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‘Accounting’ and ‘emancipation’ have typically been seen as contradicting each other.
Yet, as a social practice, accounting is deeply implicated in social concerns and should
be evaluated in terms of its contribution to social well-being. Social analysis, seeing
accounting intertwined in a wider social context, has reached a deepened appreciation
of accounting’s problematic character. This book presents a critique of accounting
that emphasises it’s emancipatory and enabling potential.
Accounting and Emancipation adopts an interdisciplinary and supradisciplinary per-
spective that draws upon debates from the social sciences and humanities, embraces
a radical questioning of existing traditions, conventions and practices and engages
with multiple accountings and agencies in differing modern contexts in an explo-
ration of how emancipation can be positively aligned with accounting. Major focuses
of the book include the accounting of Jeremy Bentham, accounting and socialist
agitation in the late nineteenth century, the recent ‘social accounting’ phenomenon
and a reflection upon accounting and praxis.
Essential reading for academics and advanced students in accounting research, this
book will also be invaluable for policy-makers and practitioners with an interest in
accounting.
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xiii
Notes 164
Bibliography 190
Index 217
Preface
… remembrance keeps open both the past and the utopian future … [it] … is
the womb of freedom and justice.
O’Neil (1976: 4)
Yes! This book focuses upon accounting and emancipation – and argues that they
can be more closely aligned. The key accounting focus of our study is external
disclosure in the public realm, understood as an element of the communicative struc-
ture of society. We hope that the book finds a broad readership amongst those with
an interest in emancipatory endeavour.
In our on-going work, we are concerned to extend and enhance a mode of social
analysis that is broadly critical in orientation. We aim to develop critical theoretical
argumentation that elaborates and responds to a sense of crisis, that is critical of pres-
ent forms of social repression and injustice and that aspires to individual and societal
emancipation. We seek in this context to add further to the literature constituting
social analysis of accounting in action, an area in which there have been major advances
since the mid-twentieth century. Our critical theoretical approach is open to refinement
through engagement with alternative modes of social theorising and is informed by
relatively recent debates over theory in the social sciences and humanities. We share
the view that critical social and historical analysis can be developed and refined, in
some ways advancing its critical possibilities, through engaging with postmodern
theorising (Best and Kellner 1991, Best 1995; in accounting see, for example, Arrington
and Watkins 2002). Such engagement opens up, through its problematisation of
seemingly fixed and certain positions and its loosening of the grip of established
modes of thought, new avenues for social and historical analysis and facilitates
x Preface
radical re-interpretations of past discourses, including, if the logic of postmodern
interventions is to pull back from avoidable contradiction, historical discourse delin-
eating the modern (see Critchley 2001: 123, Arrington and Watkins 2002: 155).
Some of these possibilities are reflected in this book, which is especially inspired by
the view that some of the ‘old’ positive critical themes and notions – not least, eman-
cipation – can be seen in new and radical ways whilst remaining worthy of our regard
and our commitment. This is a view consistent with Critchley’s (2001: 51) sugges-
tion that ‘[t]he way one moves forward philosophically is by looking backwards in a
fresh manner’. Thus, within the book we reflect our concern to continue to develop
a rescuing critique of modernity and to advance the theme that a radical democratic
polity can be facilitated by openness in the communicative structure of society.
Relatedly, we indicate the continuing actual and potential significance of labour in
the realm of social praxis. Yet, in both cases we reflect a recognition of the social
actor’s decidedly compromised and problematic location. Further, we recognise
labour’s location amongst a range of agencies and institutions and the impact of con-
textual dynamics upon the nature of its significance. We also acknowledge a multi-
plicity of interests and the need to embrace an ethics of difference as well as solidarity
and to go beyond the problematic stance of a privileged knower (Ross 1988, Best and
Kellner 1991, Benhabib 1994). That is, in reflecting upon how to better align
accounting and emancipation in today’s context, we acknowledge the complex,
embedded character of and the uncertainties facing a critical holistic praxis and the
relevance of postmodern insights for this praxis.
Our work has reflected a concern to challenge the emphasis in much social analy-
sis of accounting in action upon the negative and repressive dimensions of account-
ing in society. To counter this emphasis, we have sought to contribute to an
appreciation of accounting’s mutability, including in terms of how it has been vari-
ously envisioned in society (cf. Best 1995). We have attempted to elaborate some of
the ambiguities of accounting’s social positioning, including indicating that it has no
necessary class belongingness and that it exhibits a contradictory character as a com-
municative and strategic practice (cf. Benhabib 1986). And we have tried to promote
and advance the envisioning and realisation of accounting as an accounting beyond
convention, including an accounting taking on the radical potential of art (Critchley
2001: 66). Furthermore, in more direct and explicit terms, we have sought to indi-
cate and to move towards the realisation of the ‘enabling’ and ‘emancipatory’ poten-
tialities of accounting, a concern and interest that indeed led to our involvement in
the editing of a special issue of Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal upon
the theme of ‘Enabling Accounting’ (Gallhofer and Haslam 1991, 1993, 1994b,
1996a, Broadbent et al. 1997). In relation to the notion of an accounting at the serv-
ice of society, the promotion and development of the view that accounting has eman-
cipatory possibilities that can be advanced through critical social analysis provided
specific motivation for this book. We were especially motivated to seek theoretical
justification for our aim to better align accounting and emancipation and to engage
in and develop socio-historical analyses and theorisings geared to the promotion
of social change (Wolin 1960). We were particularly concerned to promote ways of
seeing accounting as emancipatory and to articulate insights for the realisation of
Preface xi
accounting’s emancipatory possibilities. Such thematisation came to dominate the
book. Given the vastness of its scope, we saw ourselves as making a number of
interventions in this area. The title of our book thus emerged as Accounting and
Emancipation: Some Critical Interventions.
Chapter 1, our first substantive intervention, addresses theoretical issues in respect
of accounting and emancipation’s actual and potential alignment. We engage with
dominant ways of seeing and interacting with accounting which constrain recogni-
tion of accounting’s emancipatory potential, and with theoretical and philosophical
discourse that has put into question the very possibility of an emancipatory project.
Here we reflect that philosophy belongs to the sphere of the political (Butler et al.
2000). We suggest that acknowledgment of the subject as embedded and embodied,
and appreciation of a range of insights emerging in contemporary theoretical dis-
course (including recognition of the flux and instability of theoretical concepts), still
allows us to mobilise emancipation as a social goal. Further, we indicate that the con-
cerns of the philosophical critique of emancipation actually provide an impetus to
critical accounting research and radical accounting mobilisation by emphasising the
value of a radical democracy. Chapters 2–4 are offered here as interventions consti-
tuting contributions to social analysis as praxis. The analyses give recognition to the
view that as contextually situated social actors we can find radical potential in the
contingent particular (Leonard 1990). We elaborate critical theoretical analyses of
a broad if clearly not exhaustive range of manifestations of accounting as idea and
practice, these being selected from the vast field of such manifestations in history. We
bring out progressive and regressive features of these historical manifestations and
point to dimensions of continuity and discontinuity. Chapter 2 offers a radical inter-
pretation of the writings upon accounting of the English philosopher Jeremy
Bentham, a theoretical extension and deepening of work that has been and remains
one of our major interests. Bentham reflected a key modern discourse and wrote prior
to the establishment of a formally organised accountancy profession. Reflecting his
own particular concern to move from ‘is’ to ‘should be’ (see Mack 1962), Bentham is
understood to have held a vision of an emancipatory accounting that can still inspire
us today and encourage us to acknowledge and emphasise the longevity of calls for
social and radical accounting. At the same time, we elaborate how Bentham’s inter-
vention is problematic in a number of ways and suggest that an appreciation of these
problematics ought to inform a radical praxis mobilising an emancipatory account-
ing. If Bentham’s texts can themselves be considered an accounting in action, we
pursue the latter notion more evidently in Chapters 3 and 4 of the book. In Chapter 3,
we focus upon the mobilisation of alternative ‘counter’ accountings by radical social
activists aligned to labour. We undertake case studies of the work primarily of Henry
Hyde Champion in the late nineteenth century and explore his strategy of mobilis-
ing accounting in the context of industrial disputes, notably involving the compa-
nies Brunner, Mond and Co. and Bryant and May. Champion mobilises accounting,
including existing accountings, as part of a concern, echoing Bentham’s radical vision
through the lens of a basically Marxist praxis, to engender a transformation of soci-
ety in the name of emancipation. Our study points to dimensions of the sense in
which accounting has no necessary class belongingness. In Chapter 4, we focus upon
xii Preface
episodes and interventions of more recent times by turning our attention to a ‘social
accounting’ phenomenon. We broadly explore dimensions of a social accounting that
took off in the late 1960s and through the 1970s and that has pursued an interesting
trajectory in thought and practice through to today. Calls for social accounting here
have ostensibly again reflected mobilisations of accounting beyond the conventional
that, especially in more radical discourse and action, have been formulated in the name
of emancipatory progress. We analyse positive and regressive dimensions of social
accounting interventions that prominently involved counter information systems
type activists, business organisations, the government, the accountancy profession
and academics and point to the relevance of contextual dynamics for an appreciation
of these interventions. Our focuses are substantively on UK manifestations of
accounting, reflecting our geographical location. Nevertheless, we do hold that our
focuses are key and in some ways illustrative of more global developments. And, we
broaden out to consider these more global developments in giving recognition to the
contextual dynamics in the cases focused upon. In Chapter 5, our epilogue, we reflect
further, in general terms, upon accounting, emancipation and praxis today. This
includes reflecting on the various analyses of the book and upon how, in broad terms,
accounting can be better aligned to emancipation in today’s context. We hope that
our book can help more people to see the emancipatory potentialities of accounting
and that it stimulates further work, including in the form of more social and histor-
ical analyses, motivated by the aim of realising these potentialities through praxis. In
our view, through engagement with interactive elements or dimensions of the socio-
political order, including through setting one’s focus on accounting in this regard,
people can make a difference. We are hoping the book can encourage and stimulate
further engagement towards the realisation of a more emancipatory accounting in
a more emancipated world.
Accounting and emancipation: how can one possibly link these things together? At
the time of writing there remain, no doubt, many who would find the very idea of
juxtaposing accounting and emancipation to be somewhat absurd or ill conceived.
Linkages between accounting and emancipation have for some time readily been
displaced from perception. Rather, views suggesting that accounting has nothing to
do with notions such as emancipation are prevalent.
It seems to us that one can today all too easily come to take on board ways of see-
ing accounting and the accountant that delimit both. A widely held current percep-
tion of accounting almost reduces it to a taken for granted, somewhat unexciting and
unappealing mechanical practice that records and reports the ‘facts’ that are simply
to be recorded and reported, a technical practice that almost just is. Accounting is
apparently taken in this view to be virtually an asocial and apolitical practice. Such
a perception is in part shaped and fostered by the portrayal of accounting and the
accountant in literature, film and the media and seems to us to be of some weight at
least in the public realm of the West (Amernic et al. 1979, Tinker 1985, Power and
Laughlin 1992: 115, Beard 1994, Bougen 1994, Hopwood 1994, Fraser et al. 1999,
2000, Tew 1999). This view is consistent with a perception of accounting that also
appears to us to be in effect quite widely held, namely that accounting is not
something that needs especially to be probed into by anyone outside of the appar-
ently separable sphere of the accounting expert. As Tinker (1985) has suggested, such
a conception not only fails to question accounting, it also fuses with and is integral
to views that legitimise accounting in the public realm. Such views lend themselves
2 Accounting and emancipation
to a conservative rhetoric that legitimises much else besides. Attention in this respect
is displaced almost as much from the notion of emancipation as from accounting’s
linkage to this concept. This amounts to a way of seeing accounting that is bound up
with a way of seeing society. In this way of seeing, the current socio-political order is
taken to be at least legitimate, perhaps even the best of all possible worlds, and
accounting practice can be justified in this context (see Tinker 1984c, 1988, Lehman
and Tinker 1987, Richardson 1987, Gallhofer and Haslam 1991).
The view that accounting is an asocial and apolitical practice is one that scarcely
survives close examination. A serious probing of accounting quite readily debunks
rhetoric that equates to a bracketing of accounting from the social and thus can
foster the problematisation of positions legitimising accounting. In formal academic
and philosophical discourse, such a serious probing has manifested historically in
a worrying about accounting through numerous critical lenses, giving rise to texts of
varying degrees of radicalism that are suggestive of the need for both accounting and
social change (see, e.g., Lowe and Tinker 1977, Briloff 1986, 1993, Gallhofer and
Haslam 1993). Indeed, the history here is a long one. Notably, accounting did not
escape a critical Enlightenment questioning that crystallised in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, a questioning exemplified in the writings of Jeremy
Bentham for whom accounting was a major focus of critique (Gallhofer and Haslam
1993, 1994a,b, 1995). While we acknowledge that radical modernist discourses have
come to be variously distorted and problematised (see Arrington 1990: 2, Gallhofer
and Haslam 1995), an interpretive analysis of Bentham’s writings can indicate the
sense in which they are both a substantial critique of accounting and a critique that
can still be relevant today. In relatively recent times, a critical discourse on account-
ing has emerged especially in the adoption of a systems approach to the analysis of
accounting and the mobilisation of a variety of forms of critical social analysis, some
of which accentuate the case for radical change in accounting and society (see in this
regard, e.g. Lowe and Tinker 1977, Willmott 1983, Puxty 1993). Such critical analy-
ses have not only had to struggle against widely held perceptions of accounting in
society but also against mainstream perspectives of accounting in academia, which,
masking their own problematic political philosophy, would similiarly see account-
ing, as well as accounting research and education, as at least potentially apolitical (see
Gambling 1974, Merino and Neimark 1982, Tinker et al. 1982, Tinker 1985, 1988,
1991, Neimark 1986, 1990b, Arrington and Francis 1989, Arrington 1990, Solomons
1991a,b).
Views of accounting that go beyond the prevalent perception and at least have
begun to indicate accounting’s social location and the relevance of social deliberation
over it have not only manifested in academia but have gained some purchase in society
more generally. In short, these views equate to the construal of accounting in negative
terms, even though the practice is scarcely explicitly challenged. Accounting is not
uncommonly associated with the like of fiddling the books, fraud and a general lack
of humanity. Again, this negative construal comes through and is in part constituted
in literature, film and media in the West (Beard 1994, Fisher and Murphy 1995).
A way of seeing accounting that perceives it as negative logically indicates a linkage
between accounting and emancipation in the sense that, at a limit, accounting and
Accounting and emancipation 3
emancipation appear to be opposites. The notion of an emancipatory accounting here
comes to express a contradiction: accounting at this point is taken to be repressive.
Seeing accounting as the other of emancipation may constitute a positioning of
accounting in an emancipatory discourse but, unreasonably, it is a very one-sided one
that suppresses much of the possible envisioning of what is at stake in linking account-
ing and emancipation. The logical implications of seeing accounting as repressive
amount at a limit to a serious problematisation of a project concerned to positively
align accounting and emancipation. On the one hand, if we assume we cannot be rid
of such an accounting we would logically have to tolerate it. Such a logic can lend
itself to a conservative rhetoric. On the other hand, if we assume we can rid ourselves
of this accounting, then logically we would seek to rid ourselves of it. At the envis-
aged extreme, ridding ourselves of accounting would logically constitute an emanci-
patory act, albeit that any notion of pursuing this logic can be heavily and variously
suppressed in society. Here, all positive associations of accounting would have
been lost.
The practice of accounting is not, however, doomed to the status of an evil to be
rid of. The view that equates accounting to a pure repression is very problematic.
A negative, one-sided construal of accounting is a perspective that once more does
not survive close attention when viewed through a critical lens. The negative and
one-sided construal has been countered by argumentation that has developed out of
that critical academic discourse on accounting, briefly introduced above, which has
made accounting the focus of critical social analysis. Admittedly, much of the latter
discourse portrays accounting as negatively repressive in a way that overlaps with the
more general negative perception of accounting in society outlined earlier (see
Arrington 1990: 2). Yet the way of seeing accounting that is integral to and informs
this critical academic discourse, namely the cognition of accounting as a social and
communicative practice, encourages in that critique a going beyond simply taking
accounting to be repressive. In a branch of this critique, at least, the possibility of
a practice that has even been termed ‘emancipatory accounting’ has been envisaged
(see Tinker 1984a,b, 1985). This positive linking of accounting and emancipation,
consistent with an understanding of accounting as a social and communicative practice
of broad potentiality, constitutes a dimension of the critical academic discourse over
accounting referred to that renders this discourse more balanced and comprehensive.
As we shall suggest here, it is a step beyond a philosophy of despair, whether that
philosophy be constituted in something like a ‘radical nonidentity between the truth
of reason and any existing practice’ or in something like a continual deferral or eva-
sion of the task of formulating and seeking to realise a political vision implicating
social betterment (Leonard 1990: 259, see Critchley 1997: 357).
In relatively recent times, a challenging philosophical discourse on modernity has
arisen that has again raised questions for a project concerned to develop and promote
an alignment between accounting and emancipation. Critical thought has problema-
tised or worried about the very idea of emancipation. Strands of this discourse have
even appeared to join with conservative rhetoric in deeming it appropriate to throw
out the idea of emancipation altogether. In these trajectories of philosophical engage-
ment, one can locate the view that notions such as emancipation – and emancipatory
4 Accounting and emancipation
accounting – are what we ought to be emancipated from. For us, again, this critique
is countered by further close exploration and questioning. Engagement with this
philosophical critique of emancipation does yield substantial insights that ought
properly to lead us to seriously re-think emancipation but it does not in our view lead
reasonably to abandoning emancipation or to jettisoning a project seeking to posi-
tively align accounting and emancipation. Rather, engagement with this philosoph-
ical critique suggests new possible dimensions and resonances for such a project. It
turns out that engaging with views that at least imply that a positive linking of
accounting and emancipation is problematic actually allows us to develop this align-
ment through clarification if also through refinement. Indeed, notions that a practice
such as accounting could come to secure a better alignment with emancipation are
even thus further promoted: we can promote accounting as an emancipatory force.
Here, our concern is to elaborate key dimensions of the above argumentation. There
are a number of good reasons for doing this. We believe that a stance such as it being
deemed worthy to secure positive alignment between accounting and emancipation
is very prone to undermining and appropriation by counter progressive forces. Thus,
the progressive stance needs to be critically appraised and re-invigorated. This factor
seems to us to be of some import given the manifestations of the various perspectives,
delineated above, that risk countering a positive discourse of accounting and eman-
cipation. Indeed, the notion that accounting can be positively aligned with emanci-
pation is one that at least has come to be somewhat muted in even the critical
accounting literature (Broadbent et al. 1997: 265). Furthermore, it appears to us that,
consistent with this near silence and helping to sustain it, the promotion of emanci-
pation as an idea more generally has become less common in recent times. In this
respect, emancipation has in some cases been displaced by a variety of other related
terms – such as enablement and empowerment – that are more easily appropriated
by those who would wish to overly water down what can for us be envisaged in the
mobilising of the idea of emancipation (see Inglis 1997). In the accounting literature,
if terms such as enablement and empowerment can still be used to connote a more
substantial emancipatory project (see Broadbent et al. 1997, Broadbent 1998), it is
also the case that there are usages in this literature that at least are more problemat-
ically ambiguous (see the various contributions to the special issue of the Accounting,
Auditing and Accountability Journal on ‘Enabling Accounting’ 1997). Lather (1991: 3),
in contributing to the critical feminist education literature, felt the need to point out
that her usage of empowerment went beyond ‘the reduction of the term as it is used
in the current fashion of individual self-assertion, upward mobility and the psycho-
logical experience of feeling powerful’. Emancipation itself has come to be problem-
atically appropriated, being largely restricted to usage in an overly limited sense
equating, for instance, to moving forward within current structures. Aside from the
need to counter a conservative rhetoric, there are other reasons for elaborating argu-
mentation that would foster a renewed positive alignment between accounting and
emancipation. In our view, the notion of positively aligning accounting and emanci-
pation is a complex and fluid one that is properly shaped or influenced multifariously
in society. It needs to be thus assessed on an on-going basis. We also hold that it
needs to be kept under review and explicitly re-appraised if there is to be hope of
Accounting and emancipation 5
extending appreciation of it and retaining and enhancing its import. While there are
fragments of a rationale for developing and promoting anew the positive link between
accounting and emancipation in the critical accounting literature (e.g. Broadbent
et al. 1997) there is a need to attempt this in a more explicit and fuller way in the
terms we have suggested.1
We initially explore here critical appreciation of accounting in academic discourse.
We elaborate how this critical appreciation develops out of a way of seeing account-
ing that takes it to be a social and political practice, a way of seeing that goes beyond
prevalent perspectives of accounting as apolitical. The predominant understanding of
this critique is that accounting functions repressively in society. We delineate how
a branch of this critique goes on to envisage the possibility of an accounting that can
play an emancipatory role as part of a broader critical praxis. Having traced these basic
linkages between accounting and emancipation in the literature, we go on to engage
with the worrying about emancipation in relatively recent philosophical discourse.
We elaborate the sense in which engaging with this discourse allows us, through clar-
ification and refinement, to develop and promote a project concerned to further
mobilise a positive alignment between accounting and emancipation.
Critical writers on accounting who see the possibility of something akin to an eman-
cipatory accounting, a construct which is explicitly used by Tinker (1984a,b, 1985)
(see also Cherns 1978, Sotto 1983, Gallhofer and Haslam 1996a), have theorised
accounting in relation to dialectical tension. Accounting can function repressively
Accounting and emancipation 7
overall but through social interaction it can come to function in accordance with an
emancipatory role. An erstwhile repressive or alienating accounting can be transformed
into an emancipatory accounting. Accounting is theorised as being constituted in such
a way that it is never fully captured by repressive forces and is viewed as engendering
countervailing or what might be termed contradictory forces through social interac-
tion. Contradiction in society is viewed here as an engine of social change (see Neimark
and Tinker 1986: 377–8). Countervailing forces might be heightened in particular
contexts such as contexts involving social systemic crisis or intense social struggle.
With their vision of accounting’s emancipatory possibilities, critical researchers indi-
cate the case for the capture of accounting by the repressed through social struggle.
And they have come to envision this capture as positively aiding the repressed rather
than simply mitigating the effects of a repressive functioning. That accounting has no
necessary class belongingness is thus given a significant emphasis (Tinker 1985,
Lehman and Tinker 1987, Gallhofer and Haslam 1991).
An appreciation of accounting’s emancipatory possibilities implies seeing account-
ing as at least potentially aiding (and being integral to) or giving further help to an
emancipatory project. Critical researchers thus envisage accounting as functioning to
help overcome repressive obstacles so that a better state is realised. That is to say, they
envisage accounting as functioning to contribute to the elimination of a gap between
an actual experience of alienation and a potential state envisaged beyond this prob-
lematic experience. A vision of accounting as an emancipatory force is consistent with
seeing accounting as a communicative social practice that functions as a system of
informing that renders transparent and enlightens with the effect of social better-
ment. It is a vision in which a progressive community comes to control accounting
rather than be controlled by it, a reflection of a proper accountability. This is to fore-
see an accounting that does not function to repress. It can also be understood as an
emancipated view of accounting, at least relative to many mainstream views: new
visions of accounting, translating into new practices of accounting, here throw off the
constraints of past accountings in terms of their content, form, aura and usage. And
connotations of accounting that see it as negative are transformed through praxis into
connotations that see it as positive.
Critical writers envisioning accounting’s emancipatory possibilities have recog-
nised the significance of intervention by human agency in bringing about the reali-
sation of these possibilities and have at least in effect advocated such intervention.
In this regard, that people can come to see accounting differently, in terms of its
emancipatory dimensions, is itself understood and fostered as an element of praxis.
A number of other dimensions of praxis are recognised in critical discourse.
Supported is action to pressurise for change in accounting and its context that would
constitute the realisation of accounting’s emancipatory possibilities. This can involve
mobilising a counter information system or what one might call a counter account-
ing. It can include pressurising government and the accountancy profession towards
change in respect of accounting, for instance by reminding these institutions of their
claim to function in the public interest and attempting to get them to face up to that
challenge more seriously (see Willmott 1990, Cousins and Sikka 1993, Mitchell and
Sikka 1993, Sikka and Willmott 1995, Sikka 2000). Also supported is praxis in and
8 Accounting and emancipation
through accounting education (see Tinker 1985, Gallhofer and Haslam 1996b). And
research is advocated as a form of praxis (cf. Lather 1991) that can help stimulate
emancipatory engagement in and through accounting and suggest insights for such
engagement. Critical, interpretive and contextual analysis is especially put forward
here (see Cooper and Sherer 1984).
This challenging discourse thus impacts upon the concept of emancipation, consti-
tuting a worrying about the concept in various ways (Lather 1991: 4). At the very
least it expresses concern about some particular ways of seeing emancipation.
An extreme view that has come out of the challenging discourse, namely that
emancipation has dissolved as a goal we might reasonably desire altogether, is a view
that in our opinion must be countered. We have to overcome the overly debilitating
Accounting and emancipation 9
dimension of a critique that has rendered a discourse of emancipation more anxious.
We have to resist being silenced by the tendency in the critique to paralysis through
the deconstruction of ‘principled positions’ (Benhabib 1992, Squires 1993: 1), to
a celebration of undecidability (see here Alvesson and Willmott 1992: 440),6 to the
abandonment of all substantive support for solidarity, community, direction and
co-ordination in favour of notions of absolute difference (Biesta 1995) and to excessive
problematisation of efforts to justify emancipatory projects theoretically (Norris
1993: 186).
One way of countering the extreme view is to recognise its own totalitarian and
contradictory character. Lyotard’s engagement with totalising thought has in this
regard been viewed as totalitarian:
Postmodern sensibilities are plural, protean, not reducing to a single view – not
even to [an] ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ … Postmodernism cannot
simply be presented as the refutation of modernity’s ‘grand recite’, without in
turn exposing itself as a total theory of postmodernity.
(Nederveen Pieterse 1992: 26)
For us, there is indeed a sense in which a fear of the totalitarian can ironically fos-
ter the totalitarian (see Kellner 1988). And against the dangers of pursuing a positive
interventionism that risks the totalitarian one has to balance the negative implica-
tions of not intervening in our problematic context (see Arendt 1958, Bronner 1994).
Not unrelatedly, Alvesson and Willmott (1992) maintain that there is a danger in
contemporary theoretical currents of leaving the social totality unexamined and
unrepresented – and in this sense failing to make it the subject of an intervention –
thus going on to leave ‘virtually undisturbed’ wider social structural conditions
(pp. 448–9). These authors specifically warn that we should not trade totalising
thinking for myopia (Alvesson and Willmott 1992: 449). Relatedly, if a dogmatic
and problematic universalism can displace recognition of the many ways in which
emancipation might be realised, we should also be aware that ‘skepticism closes off
the possibility of taking up solidarity with those who are oppressed’ (Leonard 1990:
258). Since a critique assumes at least implicitly ‘a possible superior state or an eman-
cipatory change of direction’, the extreme view can be equated to a contradictory
position (Alvesson and Willmott 1992: 450).
Another way of countering the extreme view is thus to appeal to our values beyond
skepticism, which can include giving a high status to political and ethical solidarity
(Harvey 1993, Benhabib 1994), to justify a critical emancipatory project today. For
Alvesson and Willmott (1992: 446, drawing from Rorty 1989):
… does not mean that the various demands are doomed to isolation and frag-
mentation, but rather that their forms of overdetermination and partial unifica-
tion will stem from hegemonic articulations forming part of ‘historic blocks’ or
‘collective wills’, and not from the apriori ontological privilege of a particular
class or social group.14
(Laclau 1990: 215–6)
… precisely this decline in the great myths … which is leading to freer societies:
where human beings see themselves as the builders and agents of change of their
own world, and thus come to realise that they are not tied by the objective neces-
sity of history to any institutions or ways of life – either in the present or in the
future.18
(Laclau 1990: 216)
According to Laclau and Mouffe (cited in Laclau 1990: 98, Nederveen Pieterse
1992: 26), the present juncture is:
For Laclau (1992), opportunities are opened up in this regard for the radical critique
of multifarious forms of domination and the possibility for more democratic societies
(see Laclau 2000a: 208–9). Nederveen Pieterse (1992: 33), in reviewing Melucci
(1992), accentuates the positive here by suggesting that the loss of certainties brought
about by the critique can engender a new awareness translateable into co-operative sol-
idarity: ‘… if we can accept that in social relations everything is not subject to the cal-
culus of an absolute rationality, diversity and uncertainty can become the basis for a
new solidarity. From this condition of conscious frugality could come the changes in
ethical values that form the basis for coexistence’ (Nederveen Pieterse 1992: 53).19
That the critique opens up space for radicality can also be read specifically as a stim-
ulus to the development of various ‘emancipatory accountings’ in respect of the
Accounting and emancipation 19
diverse agendas. More generally, an implication of the critique is that we should
acknowledge a responsibility to positively align accounting and emancipation, albeit
in the face of complexity, uncertainty, instability and contingency. We should also
accept responsibility for the content of the concept of emancipation itself. In this
regard one can sketch out, across a range of identities, desiderata for well-being, that
can be an impetus in a radical democratic negotiation. Through this process, the nar-
row, inappropriate, dogmatic and unbalanced character of instrumental goals that
often manifest in society, can be problematised: an emancipation from problematic
ends is an element in a broader emancipatory praxis. The philosophical critique of
modernity thus at least need not dissuade one from the view that emancipatory proj-
ects can be concerned to create something rather than just prevent something. We
agree with Nederveen Pieterse’s (1992: 13) view that ‘emancipation is not simply
about saying no, reacting, refusing, resisting, but also and primarily about social cre-
ativity, introducing new values and aims, new forms of cooperation and actions’. This is
to go beyond Alvesson and Willmott’s (1992: 450) view that the anti-authoritarian
emphasis of a critical theoretical perspective leads it only to counter ideologies and
arrangements ‘that obstruct human freedom, not filling the latter with particular
contents’. In our view, one can appropriately construct a more positive vision or
sketch of a future society, if recognising it as such and acknowledging its instability
(Bronner 1994).20
In respect of providing a stimulus more specifically to projects giving greater
attention to accounting in the context of a broader emancipatory praxis, the philo-
sophical critique of emancipation points to the relevance of analysing detailed speci-
ficities of the social and places emphasis upon the potentiality of democratic forces.
The emphasis upon the relevance of analysing detailed specificities is arguably especially
an encouragement to focused social analysis of accounting in action, albeit that
critical accounting researchers have engaged in such analysis for some time. The
emphasis upon the potentiality of democratic forces is for us very important. If
we accept that accounting is a communicative social practice that can function as
a system of informing including in respect of concerns to render accountable,
then the emphasis upon radical democratic forces implies that greater attention be
placed upon accounting in terms of its potentiality to function positively vis-à-vis
radical democracy. Communication, information and accountability are key terms
in a discourse of democracy (see Bronner 1994). The philosophical critique of
modernity can be understood to emphasise and promote democratic forces in
a number of ways. For example, Laclau holds that a going beyond totalising
perspectives can implicate the unleashing of positive forces in terms of a radical
democracy:
People do not now have to justify their demands before a tribunal of history and
can directly assert their legitimacy on their own terms. Social struggles can thus
be seen as “wars of interpretations” in which the very meaning of demands is
discursively constructed through struggle.22
(Laclau 1990: 216)
For Nederveen Pieterse (1992: 31), democracy is a ‘recurrent theme in the con-
temporary re-orientation of emancipatory thought’. Several texts emerging out of the
philosophical critique have placed a particular significance on the critique’s positive
implications for a praxis emphasising democracy (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985, Laclau
1990: 98, 196, Nederveen Pieterse 1992: 26).23
What then, in brief, does the philosophical critique imply for the range of ele-
ments that can constitute an emancipatory praxis in and through accounting? We
have seen that the critique aptly modifies aspects of a praxis concerned to better align
accounting and emancipation. It appropriately shapes the envisioning of accounting
in relation to emancipation, this envisioning constituting an element of praxis. And
it duly transforms how we can develop an understanding of accounting’s emancipa-
tory dimensions through the contextual analysis of accounting in action, a further
element of praxis that is constitutive of accounting research. In respect of research,
critical, contextual and interpretive analysis is further promoted by the challenging
philosophical discourse which especially emphasises the case for paying attention to
detail and reflecting awareness of the dangers of an excessive and problematic dog-
matism and universalism. Accounting education, also an element of praxis, has not
been specifically highlighted in the above but the critique duly impacts in this
sphere in a way similar to its impact upon accounting. For instance, the ‘educator’,
inter alia, needs to put more emphasis on giving a voice to those with whom s/he
interacts in the context of educational activity (see, e.g. Gore 1993). Praxis concerned
to pressurise for accounting change can also properly respond to the philosophical cri-
tique, for instance, by going beyond a crude dichotomous thinking, adopting the
more modest epistemological and eschatological ambitions and relatedly reflecting
a heightened awareness of and sensitivity to the problematics of universalism. Thus
the philosophical critique implies modification to various elements of an emancipa-
tory praxis in and through accounting. We should stress, however, that this is far
from implying the abandoning of the project aimed at positively aligning account-
ing and emancipation. Indeed, we can still have our theories about emancipatory
possibilities, practices and processes and we can still sketch our vision of a better
accounting in a better society – an accounting for emancipation (see Bronner 1994).
We have also indicated that, albeit that we need to appreciate the difficulties of the
task, aligning accounting positively with emancipation today is a task that can be
given further emphasis in a broader critical praxis. The philosophical critique
considered can engender, through clarification and refinement, the development
and promotion of a positive positioning of accounting in relation to emancipation.
Accounting and emancipation 21
We have indicated how the philosophical critique actually re-invigorates and
re-vitalises the project concerned to foster an alignment between accounting and
emancipation, notably by, in emphasising radical democracy, suggesting the need to
give greater attention to accounting in terms of its potentiality to function positively.
Or, with appropriate awareness and sensitivity, forward accounting!
2 Jeremy Bentham, accountant1
A radical vision of an emancipatory
modern accounting
From the art of Pauper Economy, studied with any attention, the transition is
unavoidable to the ministering art of book-keeping … book-keeping was one of
the arts which I should have to learn … the cries of the poor called aloud and
accelerated the demands for it …
(Jeremy Bentham UC, cliiia: 33–4)
Philosophy requires both critical and logical destruction and patient hermeneutic
reconstruction.
(Critchley 2001: 47–8)
So much was Bentham in advance of his age, that Sir Samuel Romilly recom-
mended him not to publish several of his works, as he felt assured that printing
them would lead to prosecution and imprisonment. Many … I have not deemed
it safe to give to the world … they remain in the archives …
(Bowring 1877: 339)
Bentham himself came to develop different criteria for his published and non-
published writings and justified this by his context. Mack (1962) makes the point
that, especially in the very oppressive British regime of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, Bentham was very careful about what he wrote in public. For
her, Bentham’s unpublished material was much more radical as well as more carefully
argued and theoretically developed. Given that Britain was a tyrannical regime in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, one can see why many of his views
scarcely entered the public realm in his own life time (see Mack 1962, Foot 1984).
In this regard, Harrison (1983: 131) notes that when Leigh Hunt, the radical jour-
nalist and publisher, was imprisoned for publishing work critical of the authorities,
Bentham visited him in prison to offer his support.
Bentham’s basic radicalism can be summarised thus: he was critical of the world
as it was and sought a better world. This is evident in his focus on the law from his
earliest writings. Like Beccaria, Bentham continually stressed a distinction between
what the law is and what it ought to be, or, as Bentham sometimes put it, between
‘expository’ and ‘censorial’ jurisprudence (Hart 1982: 41). By at least the same exten-
sive measure by which he came to see the scope of the law he was concerned to criti-
cally appraise and question it in his concern to rationalise it: the institution of
accounting, as we shall see, came within his ambit in these respects. Mack (1962: 67)
summarises the extensiveness of Bentham’s critical or ‘rationalising’ approach as fol-
lows: ‘ … to cleanse the Augean stable to any purpose there was no other way than to
pour in a body of severe and steady criticism and to spread it over the whole extent
of the subject in one comprehensive unbroken tide … ’. Through a rationalisation of
the law, as broadly envisaged, well-being would be enhanced.
Viewing society in his own day and with the expectation that this would be the
case for many ages to come, Bentham held that people had to be helped towards hap-
piness. The concern to help others thus leads Bentham to embrace an interventionist
stance – particularly on behalf of the oppressed – that would be evaluated in terms
of its effects. Bentham’s concern to intervene, which some see as threatening liberty,
can rather be interpreted as a dimension of his radicalism reflecting a critical under-
standing of his socio-political context that has affinity with many later critical posi-
tions. What Bentham is concerned to achieve he calls general happiness rather than
Jeremy Bentham, accountant 39
liberty. In one sense, however, Bentham strives for liberty in his pursuit of general
happiness. The logic of his position is that he is concerned to secure a very general
freedom: the freedom to actually realise one’s potential happiness, viewed holistically.
When Russell (1962) and others suggest that Bentham cared little for liberty they
typically meant liberty in a narrow sense. Even, however, in respect of particular
liberties, Bentham did actually care about striving for these (rather than seeing them
as ‘natural rights’ – although he did use the language of rights and duties) to the
extent they were congruent with general happiness.28 Bentham had an awareness
that, for instance, progress in respect of a particular emancipatory campaign was
likely only to be a step on the road and might actually lead to countervailing repres-
sions elsewhere. More generally, influenced by Helvétius, he stressed the importance
of contextual factors that might be managed to impact upon people (Boralevi 1984:
7–10, Smith 1989). Bentham has a sense of obstacles to progress in his context. These
include that people might seriously misconceive what constituted their happiness.29
For instance, consistent with the above argumentation, Bentham understood that
people might come to adopt an instrumental and narrow reasoning. Rather than keep
the goal of happiness in mind they might get obsessed about a goal that could easily
become incongruent with it. Thus, the interventionism which in some ways creates
its own constraints is motivated by radical aims and a radical understanding of the
context.
Consistent with his stance on the importance of context, Bentham therefore
appears to have acknowledged that people could fall into illusions. This is another
dimension of his radicalism worth elaborating upon here. Hart suggests:
Bentham had as vivid an appreciation as Karl Marx of the ways in which mys-
teries and illusions, often profitable to interested parties, have clustered round
social institutions, concealing the fact that they with their defects are human
artefacts, and encouraging the belief that the injustices and exploitation which
they permit must be ascribed to nature and are beyond the power of men to
change. ‘Law’ says Bentham ‘shows itself in a mask’, and much that he wrote was
designed to remove it.
(Hart 1982: 2)
… human society and its legal structure which had worked so much human mis-
ery, had been protected from criticism by myths, mysteries and illusions, not all
of them intentionally generated, yet all of them profitable to interested parties.
(Hart 1982: 25–6, see Boralevi 1984: 176).
Boralevi (1984: 176) suggests in this regard that Bentham had an appreciation of the
concept of ideology not far from the sense of Marx in his The German Ideology and that
he in effect attacked the institutions of the status quo in terms of ideology (see also
Russell 1962: 743). He saw the establishment of his own time as corrupt in many ways.
For Bentham ‘the avaricious … calumniate the poor, to cover their refusal … [to help
40 Jeremy Bentham, accountant
the poor] … with a varnish of system and of reason’ (Boralevi 1984: 102). Sinister
interests delude the people and instil prejudice, adding to the oppression. The peo-
ple are in effect corrupted by ideological forces. The character of the people is debased
and their sensitivity to suffering diminished. These developments, however, can
inspire a desire for counter actions on the part of the oppressed (Boralevi 1984: 176).
Thus, Bentham advocated a counter discourse aimed at enlightening or educating
people away from the forms of ideology that could capture them towards wisdom and
an appreciation of what was the best way forward. More generally, he sought to arrive
at an educated and wise governance. Bentham envisaged that the rationalisation of
the law, albeit not straightforward, was to involve the attainment of an understand-
ing, involving foresight – beyond the illusions – as to the consequences of a law for
general happiness, on the part of the governors and its application: the adoption of
critical elements of jurisprudence (Mack 1962).
Another radical aspect of Bentham’s intervention in respect of social practices and
institutions is its extensiveness. If we consider his work on law we can attain a good
appreciation of this. Influenced by Helvétius, who wrote about the great significance
of creative legislation (as well as education) for the progress of humanity, Bentham
held that changes in the law extensive in character constituted the most promising
mode of intervening for human betterment (every change in the law had to be sup-
ported by a rationale in terms of the general happiness principle). In keeping with
his holism, Bentham came to see anything – systems of governance, rules, practices,
institutions and knowledges (elements in the order of things) – that might be
mobilised so as to regulate matters in society as a branch of law. The law was insep-
arable from the whole social structure and included political economy as a branch
(Mack 1962: 97, 420, Postema 1989). It thus could be conceived of as including
practices of education and management.30 The mobilisation of the law as thus
broadly conceived – as a system of governance, regulation, management and admin-
istration – had a key part to play in engendering happiness. Relatedly, everyone was
to be looked after by a benevolent and caring system of government and moved
towards their potential (Mack 1962: 69, Boralevi 1984). Bentham not only thought
it unreasonable to see the inhabitants of the Panopticon as, unaided, the best judges
of their own interests but also thought it reasonable to seek to help those much
better off in the community, aiding their will to do good (Mack 1962).31
Bentham’s somewhat pragmatic and pedestrian interventionism (see Hart 1982:
25) initially does not appear especially radical. Nevertheless, his appeal to caution
and his concern to understand context and experience (Boralevi 1984: 17, 190) may
be considered to have some affinity with a critical approach informed by more recent
debates in respect of theory and praxis. Boralevi (1984) points to a number of dimen-
sions of pragmatism but still links his work to the goal of emancipation. Bentham
viewed his Panopticon as a less than ideal system but one practically suited for the
purposes he envisaged in his context. Many of his peers were against relieving the
indigent in any way (Boralevi 1984: 103–4). Some might view Bentham’s pragma-
tism as pedantic (p. 10) yet Bentham ‘never forgot to be concerned with the people
living in a period of transition’ (p. 11). He held that major ruptures to the socio-
political order were likely to bring about serious problems and so preferred gradual
and pragmatic change if possible (Mack 1962: 403, 411). He conceived that progress
Jeremy Bentham, accountant 41
in one area might mean regression in another and sought to proceed cautiously so
as to assess the situation and modify the trajectory as appropriate. He did not like
the idea of initiating ‘wars and storms’ (Russell 1962: 742). This depended on the
context, however. Bentham could embrace the more obviously radical position of
seeking a more revolutionary action. Schemes that excluded people from participa-
tion in social activities for no good reason harvested this. An especially extreme
censorial government (one can presume even more extreme than the government
of his own day) ought to be overthrown, even by more revolutionary ways (Mack
1962: 182).
Bentham was also, radically, an advocate of democracy. He came to the view that
if government was in the hands of an elite, the propensity to act in accordance with
their own misguided (and sinister) conception of their interests would typically
dominate their potential susceptibility to a wisdom promoting the general interest
(and their own genuine interests). It was such reasoning, combined with a view that
the very act of participation in formal governance by an individual could enhance
that individual’s well-being (supra), that led Bentham to the radical advocacy of
democracy. Bentham, with Frances Place, James Mill and other radicals, looked for-
ward to the day when an enlightened populace rather than an elite would control the
system of governance (see Boralevi 1984: 107, Gallhofer and Haslam 1996b). He was
an advocate of an extensive democracy in the sense of governance by the people with
equal voting rights, including for women, frequent elections, secret ballots and an
overthrow of property qualifications (Russell 1962: 742). As early as 1773, he
declared under the heading ‘Public Virtue in the Body of the People’ that the people
were his Caesar, a Caesar he sought to render better informed and enlightened (Mack
1962). From 1789 he held that women should be given the vote and educated:
women had to be given an equal dignity (Boralevi 1984: 14, 21). A key democratic
emphasis of Bentham’s polity is his emphasis upon participatory inclusion. Bentham
stood against any schemes that shut out categories of people from participation in any
social activity without any good reason. Griffin–Collart (1982) points to the irony of
accusing Bentham of authoritarianism – as many studies viewing Bentham through
‘Panopticism’ tend to do – and stresses how much he was concerned in his work to
give equal consideration to the interests of all of the people and involve them in gov-
ernance to this effect. William Thompson, one of Bentham’s socialist friends, empha-
sised Bentham’s radical democratic view in elaborating upon him: ‘ … the philosophy
of that enlightened and benevolent man, embraces in his grasp every sentient human
being, and acknowledges the claim of every rational adult, without distinction of sex
or colour, to equal political rights’ (cited in Boralevi 1984: 24). In the future ‘Age of
Prevention’ that Bentham envisaged – an age in which the people would foresee the
conditions that lead to crime, or more generally would foresee the obstacles that
stand in the way of the realisation of happiness, and intercept or counter these nega-
tives (Mack 1962: 77, 171–3) – the people would be able to take control, look after
themselves and hence, in Bentham’s view, look after each other. Everyone would be
their own legislator: the only control was self-control, for well-being. The people
would not see the system of governance as something alien from them and oppression
would thus be countered (Mack 1962, Boralevi 1984).
42 Jeremy Bentham, accountant
Clearly, to educate a democracy might be more difficult than to educate an elite,
but a democracy, albeit its problems (and Bentham understood that it could still
abuse minorities), would in Bentham’s view be more likely to make decisions in
accord with the general interest because of the numbers that would in effect be
required to support policies. He believed extensive democracy and popular sover-
eignty would best reinforce the commitment to general happiness and best ensure
that the associated benevolence and insight would manifest effectively. He appreci-
ated in this regard that governance was not a matter of a precise and certain science
but that it involved judgment and given the aim of general happiness he deemed it
appropriate to involve everyone in the process of governance. He feared that the
smaller the group of governors the more likely that more narrowly selfish, less bene-
volent or less wise dimensions of their perceived interests would dominate or counter
their will to benevolence and wisdom to the detriment of general happiness.
Bentham’s reliance upon the masses, in effect, has some affinity with, even if differ-
ing from, Marx (Mack 1962, Hart 1982).32 A democracy would be more likely to be
wise and virtuous. His concerns to enlighten and educate the public, which he again
shared with Helvétius, in this context were emphasised all the more.
The radical Bentham promotes enlightenment and education (Mack 1962: 249,
323). In the 1770s he declared that political evil was the product of ignorance and
that an enlightened democracy would reconcile the will and understanding in favour
of benevolent and progressive action (Mack 1962: 412–3). Bentham was a supporter
of education for all (Mack 1962: 207). UCL, which Bentham fostered, was the first
English university open to students without distinction of class, religion or sex
(Boralevi 1984: 15). Bentham sought to contribute to an overcoming of the ‘failure
on the part of ordinary men to realize that the forms of law and human society were
at bottom merely human artefacts, not natural necessities but things actually made
by men, and hence things which could be unmade and remade … ’ (Hart 1982:
25–6). Educating people as well as enhancing their material welfare was understood
here as making popular sovereignty more effective. Education itself was to be demo-
cratised. These processes were understood to enhance positive movement towards the
general happiness criterion. It is in the context of his broad concern to educate and
enlighten, including to make transparent, and more generally in his concern to
mobilise mechanisms for a radical social regulation, that we can locate Bentham’s
mobilising of publicity. And here we find Bentham’s accounting. Thus, publicity and
accounting are very much integral to Bentham’s radical progressivism. We turn to
publicity, and accounting publicity, next.
In a draft of a letter to his friend the scientific agriculturist Arthur Young, him-
self a promoter of rationalised book-keeping in agriculture, Bentham’s praise of
accounting publicity and the significance he gave to it reaches a grand height:
… [I]f the season were not over for the manufacture of Heathen Deities,
a Goddess, a Muse at the least thus ought to be for agricultural book-
keeping … your President should canonise her – you should be her High-Priest –
and her place – should be at … [?] … right-hand … and these two Tables you
may consider as so many exercises, the production of a learner … in simple truth
a learner … laid with all fear and trembling … awe and reverence … at the feet
of a master … I had all along said to myself, that while the Penitentiary House
was building … [?] … book-keeping was one of the arts which I should have to
learn … the cries of the poor called aloud and accelerated the demand for it …
accept accordingly some anticipations …[at this stage]… mere crudities … on
book-keeping.36
(UC, cliiia: 33–4)
From the art of Pauper Economy, studied with any attention, the transition is
unavoidable to the ministering art of book-keeping. … book-keeping was one of
the arts which I should have to learn … the cries of the poor called aloud and
accelerated the demands for it …
(UC, cliiia: 33–4)
Jeremy Bentham, accountant 49
In keeping with his aim to aid the ‘subject many’ and his call for an extensive
democracy, Bentham thus places great stress on the need to render open to view those
he perceives to have relative power in society – such as those leading significant
organisations or administering the state (supra). Further, Bentham relatedly sought to
make visible to the world the conditions and experiences of the poor and disadvan-
taged in order to stimulate action directed at the improvement of these conditions
and experiences. This is consistent with Bentham’s declaration that publicity is the
soul of justice.
Consistent with a practical and interventionist emancipatory stance, Bentham
especially did not trust those he envisaged to have relative power in the community.
He was not prepared to accept without questioning, for instance, the ‘prerogatives of
some corporations’ (to use Foucault’s 1980: 152, words). For Bentham (1843a: 589):
‘Whom ought we to distrust, if not those to whom is committed great authority,
with great temptations to abuse?’ Bentham’s concern to question the relatively pow-
erful extends to his promoting counter publicity systems to challenge official systems
of publicity (Bentham 1843a: 583).39 In advocating accounting publicity, Bentham
maintains that ‘the eye of the public is drawn upon the subject’ to operate ‘as
a check … [upon] … personal interest and favouritism’ and other abuses, especially of
the relatively powerful vis-à-vis the relatively oppressed (UC, cliiib: 281, Bahmueller
1981: 190). Thus, an accounting publicity that would serve the oppressed would
make visible the relatively powerful and facilitate an assessment in the public realm
of whether their behaviour fulfilled standards acceptable to the community. Bentham
is optimistic about publicity ‘disciplining’ the relatively powerful, an optimism
reflected in his opinion that ‘the publicity of debates has ruined more demagogues
than it has made’ (Bentham 1843a: 588).40 Accounting publicity was therefore to be
geared towards aiding the will of those exposed to realise their most benevolent
possibilities or stimulating them to fulfil their duty to humanity, a very general
duty – including or encompassing a duty to serve the oppressed. Analysis of
Bentham’s writings on the duty of humanity brings out how he was concerned to
expose moral behaviour (in his terms) and indicates how important publicity was for
him in securing this duty. Bentham refers in Pauper Management to the appropriate-
ness on the part of those running The National Charity Company of embracing two
‘duties’: the duty to economy and the duty to humanity. As Boralevi (1984) suggests,
the duty to economy is a ‘means’ while the duty to humanity is an ‘end’. To better
gear social practices to the duty of humanity and the concerns of the oppressed,
accounts were to make visible the moral as well as the economic. Harrison (1983:
130) points out that in his pauper management and Panopticon projects the chief
sanction designed to align the interests of the managers with their duty to be humane
in general was publicity. For Bentham:
The duty of the manager of an industry house has two main branches: duty
towards those under his care, resolvable into humanity – and duty to his princi-
pals (the company), resolvable into economy. Publicity, the most effectual means of
applying the forces of moral motives, in a direction tending to strengthen the
50 Jeremy Bentham, accountant
union between his interest and the humane branch of his duty; by bringing to
light, and thus exposing to the censure of the law and of public opinion, or at
any rate of public opinion, every instance of contravention.
(Bentham 1797: 51–2)
The commercial process or operation, on the subject of which, under the name of
Book-keeping, works in such multitude have been published, is but a branch –
a particular application – of an art, of the most extensive range, and proportion-
able importance: viz. the art of Book-keeping at large – the art of Registration – of
Recordation – the art of securing and perpetuating Evidence.
(Bentham 1816: 61)
The Italian method, or method of Double Entry, is the name given to that system
of Book-keeping, which is commonly employed in establishments of superior
importance. Unfortunately, old established as it is, the obscurity of this method is
still more conspicuous than its utility; and in consequence, generation, instead of
correction of Error, is but too frequent a result. The obscurity has for its sole cause,
the fictitiousness, – and thence the inexpressiveness, or rather the misexpressiveness, –
of the language.52
(Bentham 1816: 63–4)
56 Jeremy Bentham, accountant
Bentham argues in this context that proper book-keeping should be portrayed in his
planned educational instruction as:
Correct, complete, clear, concise, easy to consult – in case of error, so framed as not to
cover it, but to afford indication of it – appropriate, i.e. adapted to the particular
practical purpose it has in view – the purpose, for the sake of which the labour
thus bestowed is expended – in these epithets may be seen the qualities desirable
in a system of this kind.
(Bentham 1816: 61–2)
Frame for this purpose at the outset, a set of blank books or forms to be observed
in all, improving them from time to time … [and a] local-consideration observ-
ing principle – not to push the principle of uniformity too far.61
(Bentham 1797: 50, cf. 103, see also his Constitutional Code)
… the hermit of Queen Square Place, sitting on his platform in the dining room,
dreaming of a world that had adopted his code and canonized him as High
Codifier and Grand Benefactor of all mankind. … Whatever community adopted
his constitutional code, he was confident, would have no further need of any of
its former institutions, and whoever opposed the code was an enemy of the
people. For the good produced would be pure from evil, and the government
perfectly directed to the interests of the governed. In the end the very precision
on which Bentham rested his faith defeated his purpose. … By ruthlessly ignor-
ing the refractions of ideas and emotions, he produced devices of a monstrous
efficiency that left no room for humanity.
(Letwin 1965)
This reading of Bentham can be related to tensions in his work. He seeks that the
people be in control, but wants to direct them first. He wants their views to be
reflected in their complexity and diversity but seeks a cost-efficient and universal way
of understanding, educating and enlightening them that threatens such intricacies.
Such tensions may be located in any radical progressive work, and Bentham actually
did show an awareness of these tensions and a sensitivity towards the issues involved
(Letwin 1965, acknowledges as much) – yet the case can be made that he slips too
often into a mode of intervention equating to an excessive over-confidence and an
overly insensitive dogmatism. He saw himself and his band of disciples as privileged
knowers with little time to listen directly, it seems, to the views of the repressed and
relatedly with little time to respect diversity and difference. Here Bentham is influ-
enced by his own reading of his context – a context which, to be fair, many saw as
being a poor one for the establishment of effective democratic practice – and his loca-
tion in a confident Enlightenment school of thought. Letwin (1965: 183) suggests
that Bentham sometimes acted as if he need only declare that things be so in order
for them to happen. He was also somewhat naively optimistic about the progressive-
ness of a democratic government (see Bowring 1843, vol. x: 66). Boyne (2000: 289)
cites Bentham writing in 1786 of the compelling potential accomplishments of the
Panopticon so that ‘wonder is not only that this plan should never … [hitherto have
been]… put into practice, but how any other should ever have been thought of’.
60 Jeremy Bentham, accountant
Such excessive confidence can lead to a simple laying down of instructions for better-
ment. And more sophisticated and participatory political strategies can be displaced.
Another way of seeing this, or another dimension of it, is to suggest that Bentham
has very little faith in people who are undirected and indeed unsupervised. Bentham
explicitly advocated or at least strongly endorsed a lack of trust, albeit that his
emphasis was upon recommending that the people as a whole should not trust those
who are relatively powerful in society. While he refers to his principle of benevolence
in the following citation, he also appears to endorse and encourage a more problem-
atically distrustful practice: ‘Here accounts must be kept, must be published …
regularly – and will be scrutinized … by many a benevolent … suspicious … envious
eye … ’ (UC, cli: 322, Bahmueller 1981: 187). If it is ironic in the light of Bentham’s
concerns to enhance morality and counter corruption, Himmelfarb (1968) could thus
link Panopticon to corruption and moral decay (following Keynes, see Mack 1962).
The over-confidence of Bentham in his own position and his associated bluntness
might translate in some instances into a tendency to see all too little good worthy of
rescue in the existing practices and institutions of a society that the radical interven-
tion is seeking to change.62
Again reflecting the tendency of his work to an insensitive dogmatism Bentham’s
texts are suggestive at times, in spite of his professed sensitivity to difference and the
particular or local, of a crude universality and overly extensive uniformity. The
following citation is striking in this respect, suggesting an obsessive uniformity:
I have a machine put together these many years for answering all such questions:
give me an hour or two to wind it up, you shall have the pro and con in its full
extent any time you please … To make the thing the easier to talk of, and
enquire after at the Bookseller’s, I have given it a particular name in a single
word, viz.: Panopticon or the Inspection-House. Panopticon is already in use as
a name for I forget what optical instrument … in or by means of which you may
see everything as the name imports … You had the goodness to offer me some
papers relative to some of the establishments to which the idea promises to be
applicable … Houses of Industry … Jails … Hospitals … Schools && … Do you
happen to want a plan of Education just now, or a plan of anything else? These
are my amusements. One thing pretty much the same to me as another.63
(Letter to the Right Hon John Parnell, Buxton, Derbyshire from
Jeremy Bentham, 2 September 1790, British Museum Manuscript,
MS 33541, f. 160, see also Boyne 2000: 288–9)
… public attention will be drawn to the subject, and, when all is said, pub-
lic opinion is a force which cannot be defied even by the greatest capitalist.
(The Labour Elector, 22 June 1889: 12)
Critical analyses have typically emphasised how accounting is shaped and captured by
hegemonic forces, thus serving the relatively powerful. Accounting has often been
portrayed as serving capitalistic forces in tensions between capital and labour (see
discussions in Ogden and Bougen 1985, Lehman and Tinker 1987, Gallhofer and
Haslam 1991). In such analyses, however, there is a danger that accounting is simply
appreciated as a crude reflection of the interests of prevailing and basically repressive
forces. Our concern here is to emphasise that accounting is more ambiguously located.
It has emancipatory dimensions and possibilities. Even the conventional ‘actually
existing’ accounting of practice has emancipatory dimensions and/can, in particular
contexts, come to function as a more emancipatory force. Exploring accounting’s
actual functioning in historical contexts can indicate an emancipatory potential. Such
analysis can foster encouragement to those engaged with accounting as praxis and
yield insights for such praxis. Here, we focus upon accounting’s mobilisation by social-
ist agitators in the context of industrial and socio-political tensions in late nineteenth
century Britain, particularly focusing upon the work of the prominent activist Henry
Hyde Champion but also giving some attention to a campaign of Annie Besant that
Champion helped inspire. In our analysis we indicate accounting’s potential to func-
tion more on behalf of the relatively oppressed and to serve an emancipatory project.
In 1888, in a speech reflecting upon the achievements of the previous four years,
Barnett could report as Warden that ‘Toynbee Hall was now inhabited by twenty
men, and was a centre of education to which some 1,000 learners were drawn every
week’ (East London Observer, 23 June 1888: 7). Beyond facilitating education, includ-
ing through making available lecture theatres and class rooms and providing lodg-
ings for students, Toynbee Hall was keen to support labour in ‘industrial disputes
resulting from the first attempts by previously unorganised workers in …
[unskilled] … trades, to achieve acceptable working conditions.’ Workers and trade
unionists were given rooms to help them ‘to shape their strategies, and to appeal to
a sympathetic public’ (Briggs and Macartney 1984: 45, Meacham 1987: 67).
Also increasingly evident was the growth of more formally organised political
movements aimed at seeking better conditions for the poor and the working class.
There was a revival in the 1880s of socialist movements in Britain. Many of the middle
classes were receptive. 1884 was a significant year with the adoption of a socialist
programme by the Christian Socialists of the Anglican Guild (Clayton 1926: 9) and
the formation of several other socialist bodies, which apart from the middle classes
also attracted prominent working class unionists. These socialist groups shared a gen-
eral concern with the interrelationship between the capitalistic system, poverty and
Accounting and emancipatory practice 69
exploitation. They differed, however, in their goals and objectives and strategies for
overcoming the negative impact of capitalism. The Social Democratic Federation
(SDF), set up in 1884 under the leadership of H. M. Hyndman, had clearly socialis-
tic objectives such as ‘the Socialisation of the Means of Production, Distribution, and
Exchange to be controlled by a Democratic State in the interests of the entire com-
munity, and the complete Emancipation of Labour from the domination of Capitalism
and Landlordism, with the establishment of Social and Economic Equality between
the Sexes’ (cited in Clayton 1926: 22).5 The Socialist League, which was set up
under the leadership of William Morris in 1884 out of a discontent of former SDF
members with SDF policies, was more international, revolutionary and anti-State in
orientation and, as Tzusuki (1961: 57) put it, aimed at a ‘genuine revolution in the
future’. The Fabian Society, also established in 1884, aimed to work for a recon-
struction of the social system by placing wealth in the hands of the community for
general well-being (Cole 1961). Although the Fabian Society propagated socialism,
it differed in its emphasis and strategies. Strongly opposed to violent revolution, it
pursued, especially after 1886, a policy of gradual democratic reform (Hulse 1970:
115). It did not advocate forming a socialist political party on the grounds that its
work would change the thinking and policies of the then main political parties
(Hopkins 1995: 142, 2000: 106).
The 1880s also witnessed a concern – in the context of a growing women’s
movement – with the working and living conditions of women. The women’s move-
ment, attempting to overcome class barriers, drew particular attention to the prob-
lems experienced by paid working class women (Bolt 1993: 174–5). Recognising
that in the sphere of work women’s interests were not represented by the exclu-
sionary policies of the male trade unions, attempts were made to organise women.
Women trade unionism was coming to be increasingly active with women very
prominent amongst the poorest paid workers. The Women’s Protective and
Provident League (WPPL), founded in 1874 by Emma Paterson as a response to the
exclusionary policies in existence and motivated by feminist principles and a concern
to effect cross-class co-operation, was concerned to fight for the establishment of
female trade unions through journalistic and strike activity. It had a strong belief that
women would gain in confidence while organising themselves (Boston 1987: 30–5,
Bolt 1993: 174–5).
The strategies employed by those wanting to overcome poverty, whether motivated
by Christian ethics, socialist principles, feminist concerns or philanthropic leaning,
show one striking similarity: the concern to make visible, through the detailed pro-
vision of ‘facts’, the extent of poverty and depravation. The social investigations of
the late nineteenth century, such as for example Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the
People of England (supra), as in the case of Dickens’ fiction and journalism (Fraser et al.
1999), were to some extent inspired by the belief, a belief promoted in Bentham’s
philosophy and in the nineteenth century statistical movement (see Cullen 1975),
that a proper knowledge of the ‘facts’ would help the process of overcoming poverty
and poor conditions. People would begin to see that environmental factors were
influential to social outcomes, whatever be the need to improve people’s morals.6
The work of the Fabian Society was very much influenced by this way of thinking.
70 Accounting and emancipatory practice
For Callaghan (1990: 39), ‘the Fabians depended on the simple proposition that
“facts were facts” and could be recognised by all rational politicians of good faith
whatever their ideological allegiances’.7 The body especially emphasised engendering
debate through educational activity and making things visible in the public sphere
through journalism, public debate and education, involving collecting and dissemi-
nating information on social questions. It organised lectures and printed essays on
socialism and current social issues in its Fabian Tracts. Its strong commitment to
publicity indicate the Benthamite as well as Marxist roots of the socialist movement
of the time. According to Hulse (1970: 115) this reflects especially Sidney Webb’s
influence for he had ‘brought to Fabianism the moderation and the respectability of
the Benthamite Utilitarian tradition, which in the previous 50 years had been sub-
stantially modified in the person and work of Mill’. Whilst this praxis of publicity
was an emphasis of the Fabians, it was also supported and practised by other social-
ists. Socialists mobilised newspapers in their attempt to increase visibility of the
injustices of capitalism. Many socialist bodies had their own newspapers and journals
attempting to increase visibility of the injustices of capitalism. These papers included
Justice (of the SDF) and Commonweal (of the Socialist League). Other newspapers and
journals with a socialist orientation included the Christian Socialist, Common Sense,
The Labour Elector (all three edited by H. H. Champion), Our Corner and The Link
(both edited by Annie Besant) and Belfort Bax’s Today (Callaghan 1990: 45). The
WPPL was concerned to mobilise facts in their attempt to make visible and draw
attention to the plight of working women.
Established accounting practice in this context functioned substantively as a cap-
italistic artefact. Although the Liberal, Laissez-Faire polity and rhetoric that was of
some influence in late nineteenth century Britain helped to shape the particular form
of accounting regulation in the 1880s, there were forces at work providing key incen-
tives favourable to accounting disclosure and publicity (see Parker 1990, Edwards,
1992, Jones and Aiken 1995, Walker 1996). A firm that had gone public, especially
if listed on the stock exchange, often deemed it easier to attract capital if publishing
accounts. Further, it would often be felt that any progress in a company’s economic
position would more easily translate into an increased share price with the appropri-
ate accounting publicity. In this regard, key dimensions of disclosure content of
interest to shareholders included whether assets exceeded liabilities, the size of the
profit and how much of the profit was to be paid out as a dividend. Often much of
it was. Late nineteenth century shareholders liked to receive tangible benefits in the
form of dividend income from their shareholdings (see Edwards 1989, 1992 cf. Toms
1998). Such recognition of the importance of accounting publicity has a long history
(Haslam 1991, Gallhofer and Haslam 1995). Accounting reports, more especially of
listed companies, would thus often be published at shareholder general meetings and
find their way into the financial pages of the press.
Such accounts may have been regulated largely by imperfect market forces but
they had attained an aura of facticity giving them a particular weight in the context.
Further, by the 1880s, auditors signing off these business facts or accounts, who
denoted themselves chartered accountants, were likely indicating their status as
members of a formally organised profession (see Edwards 1989: 277), a status that
Accounting and emancipatory practice 71
would impact upon the status of the accounts. And while the law did not require
even limited liability companies, of the general form, to publish accounts, many
companies did include provisions to publish accounts of some sort, often in connec-
tion with shareholder general meetings. Such provisions could have attained a legal-
like status, enhancing a noble aura of substance in the context (Gallhofer and Haslam
1991). This latter factor was enhanced by the significance of the Companies Act of
1862, still in force in the 1880s, which contained model articles of association spec-
ifying that companies were to present a balance sheet in a prescribed format to the
annual general meeting (AGM) (to be circulated to members a week before the
AGM), to present an income and expenditure account distinguishing between
sources of income and categories of expenditure to the AGM, to open their books to
inspection by members,8 and to undergo an annual audit by an auditor, appointed by
the members, who was not to be a director of the concern (if they could be a mem-
ber) and who was to have a right of access to the books and directors and a duty to
examine and report on whether the balance sheet was ‘full and fair’ and gave a ‘true
and correct view’ of the firm’s state (Edwards 1989: 192). Such a buttressing through
association with the law as well as with the notion of business facts could have held
even if in practice many companies, including the larger ones (e.g. listed on the stock
exchange), did not adopt the model articles, tending to prefer as much flexibility over
disclosure as the law allowed, especially in respect of the accounting (as distinct from
the auditing) provisions (see Edwards 1989, 1992, Parker 1990, Toms 1998).
What I saw in London during those few weeks completely changed the course
of my life. Whatever I have done that seems to me, in the retrospect, to have
been worth doing – that was the beginning of it.
(Champion 1983: 23)
From the early 1880s he emerged as a key figure in the socialist and labour move-
ments, initially rising to prominence in Christian Socialism and the SDF. He came
to work closely with union and labour leaders to campaign for improvements in
wages and working conditions and to promote socialism (Whitehead 1983: 17). After
his experience of being arrested (along with Hyndman, John Burns and the radical MP
Cunnighame Graham) for his involvement in the ‘Bloody Sunday’ anti-capitalist
demonstration about unemployment, he became committed to independent labour
72 Accounting and emancipatory practice
representation. Like Engels, he envisaged the latter to be achievable through an
alliance of socialists and existing working class organisations (Callaghan 1990: 49,
Hopkins 1995: 3). His vision was that radical change towards socialism was achiev-
able through democracy and non-violent action. One of his main themes was to advo-
cate socialistic government action to counter what he saw as the anarchy of market
forces (see Brotherhood, 24 June 1887: 118–9). Although involved in the SDF and the
Fabian Society, Champion was a strong and independent character who in many
respects pursued his own projects in the cause of socialist struggle – eventually
becoming alienated from the faction-ridden socialist associations of his time (Tsuzuki
1961).
Key to Champion’s socialist activism was his communicative ability, something
acknowledged by contemporary socialist agitators (Hyndman 1911: 308, 345, Mann
1923, Tillett 1931).9 He perceived a particular value in exposing through publicity
to create awareness of the need for action and to stimulate that action. An article in
Brotherhood (reprinted from the Christian World) puts it as follows:
Personally Mr. Champion is not one of the “masses” whose cause he advocates.
He is a well-to-do employer of labour, who from being convinced of the selfish-
ness and injustice of the system under which honest and industrious men and
women are ground to the point of starvation, and too often are pushed over the
border-line, has devoted his life to endeavouring to arouse the conscience of the
country, and to induce it to re-place the existing system by some better one.
(Brotherhood, 24 June 1887: 119)
No better champion of the cause – the name and the man fit each other as the
hand the glove – could have been found. He is well educated, and does not
indulge in random declamation and vituperation. He deals largely in facts and
figures, which he leaves to a considerable extent to tell their own tale …
(Brotherhood, 24 June 1887: 118–9)
The very first issue of Common Sense contrasted experiences of the financially rich and
poor in a prominent and striking way, pointing to the injustices involved. Two
distinct columns were presented in a format echoing the dichotomous logic integral
to conventional financial accounting. The left-hand side depicted ‘national wealth’
and the right-hand side ‘national poverty’. This format was used to contrast an
extravagant restaurant bill run up by a wealthy citizen in Paris (£4 0s 6d) with the
weekly expenses of a farm labourer and family (14s 9 1/4 d), a report that every
fifteenth person in England then accepted relief for poverty and, reflecting one of the
journal’s strongest themes, reports that female labour was ‘wretchedly paid’ (Common
Sense, 15 July 1887: 19).
Champion was very keen to bring out a contrast between high profits/dividends
and poor wages/conditions in the case of specific companies and to indicate in such
analyses the injustices of the capitalistic system more generally. In doing this he used
material already published (e.g. in newspapers) and his own investigative journalism.
This included making use of accounting disclosures, typically assembled from reports
of AGMs. Aspects of his usage of published accounts are similar to usages by some
other labour activists of his time, such as notably Benjamin Jones.15 Champion’s
usage was an instance of the usage of accounts in the name of a radical socialist praxis
by a prominent figure in the socialist movement. The company he focused most of
his attention on in Common Sense was that of Bryant and May Limited.
An historical overview of the rise of Bryant and May (a name continuing as a com-
pany brand today) is here useful. The rise was remarkable. From a mid-nineteenth
century general merchandising partnership, founded by the Quakers that gave it its
name, arose a notable match-making concern centred in East London.16 Bryant’s sons
came to dominate an aggressively expanding firm that was incorporated in 1884
under the Companies Acts 1862 to 1883 and listed on the stock exchange very
shortly thereafter (MDM, 12 June 1884).17 The Bryant brothers stood to benefit
greatly from the company’s financial success. They had significant ownership stakes
in the company and their remuneration was linked to company profits.18 Bryant and
May was run so as to protect the company’s financial position, and also to aggressively
74 Accounting and emancipatory practice
expand where possible.19 Within only a few years the share price soared. From 1885
the share price fluctuated around £15 through to the time Champion made Bryant
and May a focus of his analysis, for a period rising to £22 (see the retrospective in
The Statist, 5 November 1887: 513–4). Dividends of between 20 and 30 per cent on
initial nominal capital were being paid in the mid-1880s. Table 3.1 comprises some
figures for Bryant and May for the 1880s, the table indicating the close correspon-
dence between accounting profits and dividends.
By the time Champion was turning his attention to Bryant and May, financial
commentators were still congratulating the firm on its success. Wilberforce eulogised
the company in the 1880s at AGMs, using accounting disclosure – a balance sheet
with a summary statement providing information about dividends and transfers to
reserves certified as ‘a true statement of the Liabilities and Assets’ by the auditor,
accountant Richard Rabbidge – there presented. Champion brought a different
perspective.
Champion’s attention was drawn to Bryant and May by its having risen from
humble origins – so that the wealth of its founders and their inheritors could be
attributed to capitalistic business practice, its continuing to have remarkable finan-
cial success in spite of the depressed trade and his view that, in spite of the firm’s
Quaker origins, modern factory and financial wealth, the firm paid very poor wages
in return for work in poor conditions. The majority of employees were women (the
‘match girls’) coming predominantly from what were the poorer districts of East
London, where unemployment was high (see Collett 1889). In any case, match-
making in general had long been associated with poor wages and conditions (Lowell
1982). In the early 1860s, the Commission on the Employment of Children in Industry had
found horrendous employment practices and working conditions in match-making,
linking the industry to crude exploitation and serious illness. Some of the negative
practices involved home working and, although there is a suggestion that due to
automation the numbers involved at Bryant and May had dramatically fallen (Beaver
1985), the company still continued to employ a number of home workers to make
match boxes in the mid-1880s.20 If the accounting disclosure was fairly minimal and
investigative journalism was needed to bring to light wages and conditions – these
were not subjects of disclosure in the same way as the high shareholder returns! –
Champion was determined to elaborate the contrast between those receiving high
dividends, capital gains and, in the case of the Bryants, high remuneration, and those
who from the same business operations were receiving barely survival wages for their
difficult toil.
The first exposé on Bryant and May in Common Sense comes under a heading
‘Questions that Require Answers’ (15 May 1887: 11). The 1886 dividend of £80,000,
or 20 per cent of the nominal value of share capital, is highlighted21 as is the
company’s high reserve fund,22 invested in sound securities. The figures are taken
from accounts referenced at the AGM of 10 February 1887. The article ends with
a question alerting readers to the contrast that is to be exposed: ‘What is the average
wage of the workers who produced this 20%?’ Common Sense returns to where it left
off on 15 June 1887 (27). An investigator for the paper is reported as having ‘made
Table 3.1 Some financial figures for Bryant and May Limited in the 1880s
Six-month ending Dividend % on nominal Dividend per Income tax Dividend net Accounting Accounting profits/
value of share (s and d) rate (%) of tax profits opening balance of
issued nominal value of
capital shares issued (%)
Notes
a Shares issued: 60,000. By 31 December 1885, 80,000 shares had been issued but the table calculates accounting profits/opening balance of the nominal value of
shares issued.
b Figure in brackets ⫽ % return for year. With the exception of 1884, note the similarity between the figures in this column and the last column of the table, indi-
cating that typically a high proportion of the accounting profit is distributed as a dividend.
c Prior to writing off preliminary expenses £1,187 10s 0d; New Building a/c £1,396 19s 8d; to reserve fund (invested in consuls) £10,000.
76 Accounting and emancipatory practice
inquiries at Bow’ and there having uncovered insights into the wages and experiences
of a Bryant and May match-box maker. He indicates sweating, finding:
… a woman who earns a living by making on the piece-work system, the boxes
in which the “Ruby” matches are placed. The name and address of the woman
in question are very much at the service of anyone who might like to verify the
statements23… The firm supplies the thin slips of wood out of which the tray
and the outside is made; also the paper and labels. The women supply labour,
paste, firing to dry the finished boxes and the hemp wherewith to tie them up
in a bundle of 24. They are paid for 6 bundles of 24 or 144 boxes, if delivered
without any flaw (the work is carefully examined), twopence-farthing. A woman
can earn at this work, if she is quick and works uninterruptedly, about 9d in
11 hours or 3 farthings an hour, which, as our readers will know, is the usual rate
of wages for female labour on the sweating system … Illustrations of the hard-
ships entailed by this inhuman wage-slavery can hardly be required. But our
informant had in the week previous to our representative’s enquiry been able to
complete only 3 gross of boxes. This was owing to her youngest child requiring
her care. It was dying, and the mother could not neglect it even to keep up the
20%. It died and the dead body was lying in the single room while these facts
were being narrated. The mother took her poor 63/4 d worth of work to the fac-
tory, and was sent back with 4 1/2 d because in one of the gross a single matchbox
had its label slightly torn.
(Common Sense, 15 June 1887: 27)
This state of affairs is sharply contrasted with the returns to the shareholders. If the
company had so far managed to avoid having the typical image of sweaters24 they
were sweaters, nonetheless:
The peculiarly infamous feature of this case is, that it is not a struggling
middleman who grinds down this helpless women but a company returning
20% on an enormous and presumably partly fictitious capital.25
(Common Sense, 15 June 1887: 27)
The terms offered to Bryant and May employees are reported as comparing
unfavourably with those offered by other firms: ‘The woman who informed our rep-
resentative states that other firms give better terms to their employé.’ At the same
time, the difficulties of accessing information were stressed. It was especially difficult
to access the girls working in the factory:
While some of the girls who work inside the factory on weekly wages were being
interviewed at the gate in Fairfield Road, a man named Robertson, a foreman or
overseer of some sort, came out: “Here, get inside out of this” and the girls went
in humbly. We can therefore not give in this issue any information as to the
weekly wages paid to regular hands.
(Common Sense, 15 June 1887: 27)
Accounting and emancipatory practice 77
The article reports that the journal was considering mobilising the publicity for
a boycott on Bryant and May’s products – a call for an ethical consumerism:
‘Enquiries on the subject are being made with a view to organising a boycott on the
goods of Bryant and May, and the purchase instead of the matches of manufacturers
who pay better wages.’ A comment on the matchbox maker helps to bring out the
journal’s preference for state regulation with a note of irony: ‘The woman, in conver-
sation, did not appear to have fears of her liberty being further curtailed by the inter-
ference of the State.’ The journal also promises to bring further pressure to bear
through its analysis by stating a commitment to expose more, including names of the
company’s financiers: ‘We shall be glad to have the name and address of any persons,
known to be shareholders, profiting by this system of torture, also any genuine infor-
mation as to the earlier history of the firm’ (Common Sense, 15 June 1887: 27).
Common Sense indeed returns to the story on 15 July 1887 (42) under the heading
‘Who are the shareholders of Bryant and May?’ and a citation from Proverbs, XXII,
1, 2: ‘A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches and loving favour rather
than silver and gold. The rich and the poor meet together: the Lord is the maker of
them all.’ A particular concern here is to highlight the hypocrisy of ministers of reli-
gion owning shares in Bryant and May. Fourteen ministers sharing ‘in the 20%
and 221/2 % dividends’ are listed. Again, the journal calls for greater and increased
exposure:
We trust that any readers who have the opportunity will, on every possible occa-
sion, advertise the fact that these persons who preach on Sunday “Come unto me,
all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”, in their week-
day practice countenance a form of industrial tyranny which alters the text into:
“Come unto us, ye who labour, and we will pay you three farthing an hour.”
(Common Sense, 15 June 1887: 42)
The readers are promised that a copy of the issue in which this article appeared
would be sent to the address of the ministers listed. After listing other shareholders
the article attacks the capitalistic financiers:
Judging them even by the conventional standards of fair dealing these gentle-
men are sucking profit in a manner every bit as dirty as a money lender, who
extorts 30% from the necessitous, or promoter of bubble companies. It is
allowed by law, and they do not scruple to take advantage of the power they have
to oppress the widow and orphan, in order to swell their dividends. If they have
any scruples they will, now the matter is directly before them, clear their names
of the reproach of grinding the faces of the poor.
(Common Sense, 15 June 1887: 42)
Champion added to the publicity about Bryant and May by including the case in
a speech he delivered by invitation to the annual Church (of England) Congress,
a significant arena, at Wolverhampton on 5 October 1887.26 During his speech,
Champion again exposes the stark contrast between the high financial returns to the
78 Accounting and emancipatory practice
shareholders and the poor returns to the workers, again using accounting publicity.
He also pointedly refers to the shareholdings of Church ministers.27 According to
The Record’s account of the speech, described as a fair representation and reprinted by
Common Sense (15 October 1887), Champion introduced his focus upon Bryant and
May in the context of contrasting the experiences of the materially rich and poor
more generally and through an exchange with his audience:
Many of his points were most heartily taken up by the meeting, particularly
where he contrasted great riches with extreme poverty … Another little episode
arose when he touched the Bryant and May incident. There were a number of
clergymen, he said, who were shareholders in that match-making company and
the dividends on the capital were as high as 20%. “Hear, hear”, exclaimed
a voice on the platform, and the meeting interpreting it as coming from one of
the clerical shareholders laughed heartily. “That gentleman seems to think it
a capital joke”, said Mr Champion, with some severity, “but let him wait
a moment. The employés are paid at the rate of one penny an hour. Now he may
have his joke”.28
(Common Sense, 15 October 1887: 90)
The publicity concerning Bryant and May was also taken up through other media,
especially after the Church Congress speech (Common Sense, 15 September 1887
evidences earlier take up). Church newspapers published articles sympathetic to
the match girls. The Christian of 28 October 1887 (12, notes and comments) cites an
article in the Birmingham Weekly Post regarding ‘the firm of match-makers alluded to
at the Church Congress.’ After repeating the story, the paper declares: ‘If these asser-
tions are not true, let … Bryant and May … nail them to the counter at once; if they
are facts, the time is come for another Wilberforce to emancipate another race of
slaves …’ (The Christian, 28 October 1887: 12).
In relation to a similar case, The Christian advocates a form of ethical consumerism
based on publicity and suggests that shareholders ought to ‘at least have the satisfac-
tion of knowing that their profits were not being made at the expense of worn out
human bodies and minds’ (14 October 1887: 6–7). Amongst those encouraged to add
to the discourse was the Reverend J. Wright. The Family Churchman published an
article on 2 November 1887 by Wright, ‘Christ’s Poor; and their claim on Christ’s
People’, which also calls for ethical consumerism (22). The article was very much in
the style of Champion, exposing the contrasts between the situations of rich and
poor. In the case of Bryant and May the same figures as in Champion’s analysis are
used, except that the piece rate for 144 boxes is upped to 21/2 d (since typical hourly
rate of pay is estimated, this may be a printing error). The same contrast with the
20 per cent dividend is made. Additionally, Wright suggests that we can only begin
to appreciate the ‘abject wretchedness of unskilled workers in large towns’ (221) if
consideration is given to the rent they have to pay. In the East End this was from
3s to 3s 6d a week (the matchbox makers’ weekly pay having been estimated at
3s per week) (221).
Accounting and emancipatory practice 79
Others were taking notice. The campaign started, it seems, to have some impact.
Champion, perhaps to encourage others, is keen to cite evidence of his publicity
having some effect and he prints a letter pointing to an ‘ethical investment’ concern
engendered by campaigns such as his in respect of Bryant and May:
It was doubtless publicity engendered by the council speech that brought the crit-
icism to the attention of the Bryant and May board. Carkeet recorded the publicity
in his diary. Had he not been aware of it through his own reading of the papers, he
would have found out soon enough. Several people wrote in to Bryant and May as
a result of the publicity. Mr F. Abbot ‘asks whether a statement made more than once
in the church he attended with regards to wages paid to box makers and the dividend
paid to share holders is true’ (SD 24 October 1887). Charles McComas writes regard-
ing ‘statements made at the recent Church Congress at Wolverhampton which he
thinks should be answered, the wages paid per hour and per gross to the matchbox
makers’ (26 October 1887). Stephen Bourne of the Central Vigilance Society for the
Repression of Immorality (a body concerned to explore all ways in which prostitution
might be eradicated and in this connection concerned about reports of the sweating
of female labour) wrote to the chairman ‘in reference to the statements made at the
late Church Congress’ (SD 28 October 1887). Mrs Mary Allen ‘further discusses the
Dividend and Wages question’ (29 October 1887). A letter from George Ireland
specifically ‘calls our attention to an article in The Family Churchman contributed by
the Reverend J. Wright … the poverty and wages of the East End of London’
(10 November 1887). And a shareholder was prompted after the Church Congress to
request of the company that they calculate the average wage paid to the workers.29
Letters expressing concern continued into 1888. On 26 May 1888, the company
received a letter from Reverend M. J. Baugh, Salcombe Regis, that expressed an
ethical investment concern. He hesitated ‘… [to invest] … in the company in conse-
quence of unpleasant statements about the ill payment of match-making children
and would like to be assured’.30
At a meeting of the Fabian Society, Miss Clementina Black gave a special lecture
on Female labour, and urged the formation of a Consumers’ League, pledged
only to buy from shops certified “clean” from unfair wages. H. H. Champion in
the discussion that followed, drew attention to the wages paid by Bryant & May
(limited), while paying an enormous dividend to their shareholders, so that the
value of the original £5 shares was quoted at £18 7s 6d.32
(Besant 1938: 334)
Champion took the opportunity to propose a boycott of Bryant and May. The
resolution was seconded by Herbert Burrows, another leading Fabian, and carried by
the meeting. Annie Besant, already a Fabian socialist, was asked by the meeting to
investigate the case further.33 If, like Champion’s investigator, finding access diffi-
cult, Besant with Burrows did interview some of the factory girls. New material for
publicity emerged. On 23 June 1888 Besant published an article in The Link (2),
a radical half penny weekly she edited and had established with W. T. Stead34 with
the objective of serving and giving voice to the poor.35 Its motto, from Victor Hugo,
reflected a pro-active concern to change debilitating environments and an Enlighten-
ment concern to make visible to promote change for betterment, a concern that
Besant, as a leading Fabian, identified with as a matter of praxis and struggle:
The people are silence. I will be the advocate of this silence. I will speak for the
dumb. I will speak of the small to the great, and of the feeble to the strong …
I will speak for all the despairing silent ones. I will interpret this stammering;
I will interpret the grumblings, the murmurs, the tumults of crowds, the com-
plaints ill-pronounced, and all these creeds of beasts that, through ignorance and
through suffering, man is forced to utter … I will be the Word of the People.
I will be the bleeding mouth whence the gag is snatched out. I will say everything.
(The Link, 30 June 1888: 1)
Such is a bald account of one form of white slavery as it exists in London. With
chattel slaves Mr. Bryant could not have made his huge fortune, for he could not
Accounting and emancipatory practice 81
have fed, clothed, and housed them for 4s a week each, and they would have had
a definite money value which would have served as a protection. But who cares
for the fate of these white wage slaves? Born in slums, driven to work while still
children, undersized because underfed, oppressed because helpless, flung aside as
soon as worked out, who cares if they die or go on the streets, provided only that
the Bryant and May shareholders get their 23 per cent, and Mr. Theodore Bryant
can erect statues and buy parks?36
(The Link, 23 June 1888: 2)
Besant closes with a further call to boycott Bryant and May: ‘… let us strive
to touch their consciences, that is, their pockets, and let us at least avoid being
“partakers of their sins”, by abstaining from using their commodities’ (The Link, 23
June 1888). Pro-actively, Besant distributed her article to the workers as they left the
factory. In a subsequent article ‘White and Black Lists’ (The Link, 30 June 1888: 1),
Besant called for the boycott of all companies engaged in unethical practices, more
specifically paying unfair wages and providing poor working conditions. She advo-
cated publishing lists of companies that ‘ought to be severely encouraged or dis-
countenanced’. An interesting refinement of this advocacy was that she wanted the
lists constructed by reference to localities. Thus, recognising that local operations of
companies would resonate with local populations, the lists would at least emphasise
different companies to different local populations. This was understood as exerting
more pressure:
If such a list could be published for each locality public opinion might be
brought to bear very effectively on the manufacturers and sellers of goods, for
a premium would be put on honesty and fair dealing, while grasping avarice and
tyranny would cease “to pay”.
(The Link, 30 June 1888: 1)
Besant also called for comprehensive disclosure of wages and working conditions.
This had to be backed by force of law because, while Besant suggested in her article
that companies more appropriately on the white list would be more forthcoming and
furnish the publicity, the construction of a black list would be a difficult struggle.
Workers would not be very willing to talk for fear of the sack and authors would be
restricted by the fear of being taken to court under the libel law, the operation of
which, under the jury system, was captured by capitalistic interests:
Now an exposure of the way in which successful firms make their fortunes is not
likely to be popular among the class from which juries are drawn; it is the very
poor who are the victims of the oppression, and these do not find their way on
to juries …
(The Link, 30 June 1888: 1)
That this meeting affirms the truth of the statements in the articles by Annie
Besant, entitled “White Slavery in London”, in the Link of 23rd; that it protests
against the falsehoods circulated by the Bryant and May Company, and against
the shamefully low wages and the shamefully high dividends paid by them. That
this meeting calls on the Home Secretary to enforce the Law against the Bryant
and May Company, and requests him to receive a deputation of work girls on the
subject. That a union be found by the match makers.43
(Besant and Burrows in The Link, 7 July 1888: 3)
Besant is reported as declaring at the meeting that ‘the girls get from 4s to 13s
weekly while the firm paid 381/2 % dividend’ (St. James’ Gazette, 9 July 1888: 11).
Consistent with this, according to Beaver (1985: 66) a giant matchbox was paraded
at one of the demonstrations carrying the words ‘38% dividend’. In this regard, the
theme of ministers of religion investing in Bryant and May apparently featured in the
demonstrations. According to The Globe of Thursday 19 July 1888: 1, a large match-
box carried on demonstrations beared ‘on top a dummy clergyman in an attitude of
supplication’. It seems initially difficult to locate where the figure of 38.5 per cent,
or 38 per cent, came from, these not being reconcilable to the accounting profits dis-
closed or the reported dividend as a percentage of the nominal value of shares issued.
While it is possible it was misreported or arrived at in some especially eccentric way,
it is likely that the figure was computed by taking into account capital gains as well
as dividends. Besant publicised the high capital gain as well as the high dividend
in seeking to expose the company (supra).44 Besant is reported as again calling for
an ethical consumerism at the meeting and as underlining her high valuation of
publicity by claiming ‘to have stopped the fines inflicted on the girls by giving
publicity to them’ (St. James’s Gazette, 9 July 1888: 11).
As resolved by the Mile End Waste meeting, a deputation of girls accompanied by
Besant and Burrows went to the House of Commons ‘to lay some of their grievances
before Messrs. Cunninghame Graham45 and Coneybeare’ (The Link, 7 July 1988: 4)
(a meeting reported more widely by its inclusion in The Star, 11 July 1888).
Bradlaugh was persuaded to table a question in Parliament to the Secretary of State
for the Home Department asking whether the East London Inspector of Factories had
investigated complaints about Bryant and May breaking the Truck Act, whether he
was aware that some employees had been sacked after disclosing information of
breaches of the law and whether, if this be true ‘he will give directions to the Public
Prosecutor to take proceedings in order to punish such an attempt to defeat the ends
of justice by terrorising witnesses’ (The Star, 11 July 1888).
84 Accounting and emancipatory practice
In a letter ‘To the Shareholders of the Bryant and May Company, Limited’, published
in The Link on 14 July 1888, Besant drew the attention of shareholders in general as
well as the shareholding directors in particular to the unethical and exploitative
means by which their dividends had been earned.
I do not know whether Mr. Theodore H. Bryant, with his 3,000 shares in ‘84;
Mr. William Carkeet, with his 1,250 shares in ‘84; Mr. G. Bartholomew with
his 500 qualifying shares; Mr. G. B. Rix46, with his 180 shares last year and his
85 this; whether any or all of these, have special guilt on their consciences.
To-day I am concerned with you, ordinary shareholders, whose names do not
appear, as a rule, in public; you who are quiet and unobtrusive persons, going
about in society as decent respectable folk, honored as good citizens by your
neighbours … Do you know that the women and girls whose labor made the
221/2 per cent. dividend paid in February last are living, or dying, in Old Ford,
Bromley, Tiger Bay, and other districts of East London, on wages varying from
4s. to about 13s. a week?’
(The Link, 14 July 1888: 1)
She was particularly concerned to expose the double-morality of the clergy, using
Bryant and May’s own figures. Promising to print more shareholder names in the
next issue, and declaring that the shareholders should give back some of the money
unjustly and illegally taken from the match girls, she suggests that shareholders
sought to repress their own awareness of company practices:
But let us take the “average wage”; how would you like, wife of a clerical share-
holder in Bryant and May’s, to keep house for a week on 11s. 2d.? How would you
like to start for your work at half-past five a.m., reach home again at seven :p.m.,
having been on your feet nearly all the time, and after doing this for five days,
with an additional half-day on the Saturday, to take home 11s. 2d. as a
reward?”… Are you not ashamed, you priests, who read out Sunday after Sunday
“Thou shalt not steal”, and then pocket the results of thefts carried out for your
profit?… And of what avail, after all, to tell it to you, who if you cared to know
might have known long ago how high dividends are earned. You do not want to
know and you do not care to know. … Your anger is against me who have
exposed the wrong, instead of against those who have wrought it …
(The Link, 14 July 1888: 1)
The interest of Toynbee Hall was reflected in the media on 12 July 1888 when
The Times and St. James’s Gazette published a letter ‘signed by … gentlemen who have
investigated the grievances or alleged grievances of the young women employed in
Bryant and May … [and who have conducted]… a careful examination of consider-
able numbers of the girls and other people employed’ (St. James’s Gazette: 4).47 St. James’s
Gazette, highlighting the Toynbee findings, commented upon the Bryant and
May case repeating the contrast between the high dividends and the poor wages and
Accounting and emancipatory practice 85
conditions and promoting ethical investment to counter problematic company
practice:
To these statements the representatives of the match factory must now reply; and
we hope for the sake of all concerned, that they will be able to make a clear and
satisfactory answer to them. According to all accounts, theirs is a very prosper-
ous business indeed, paying dividends at an unusually high rate, while, on the
other hand, we know that their work people belong to a very poor and wretched
class; so poor and so wretched, that we utterly refuse to believe that any consid-
erable number of the shareholders in the company are willing to earn enormous
profits by rendering these poor creatures yet more miserable than under any
circumstances they must be.
(St. James’s Gazette, 12 July 1888: 4)
The Toynbee Hall letter brought out that demands that the sacked be re-instated
and that the Truck Act be followed had been joined by demands to address the poor
wages and conditions. They added more detail to the publicity. The Toynbee team
reported that there were general grievances in this respect but also grievances specific
to three categories of girls. The fillers complained they used to receive 1s 11d for fill-
ing 100 ‘frames’ but in the time it had taken them to do this they could not now earn
1s 11d using new machinery, given a rate of pay of 10d for filling 100 ‘coils’ and fre-
quent machine breakdown. They also complained they had to pay for their own
brushes (roughly 1d to 11/4d per week). The cutters down complained that their rate
of pay had fallen from 3d to 23/4 d for three gross of boxes. A farthing had been
deducted to pay for children to bring work but the children had since been removed
without restoration of the farthing so a ‘penny in the shilling’ was lost. The packers
complained of various deductions to their wages, including payments for stamps to
stamp the packages. All the girls were concerned about the levying of fines, such as
when they were late – the gates were then closed and 6d deducted. And they com-
plained that sometimes fines were deducted without explanation. While acknowl-
edging it was a slack period, the girls were reported as reckoning that recent wages
were as low as between 4s to 6s a week and that earnings were in any case never more
than 13s a week. The concern to bring more light to the wages leads the Toynbee
Hall investigators to call for a disaggregated ‘wages accounting’:
Statements of average wages are meaningless unless – (1) they are calculated for
the whole year instead of for the winter months or for a few weeks when the girls
have possibly been in full work; unless (2) they are calculated on net, not on
gross, wages [ie. after the deductions and fines]; unless (3) they differentiate the
girls who get especially high wages, such as those employed in the wax-match
department, and unless (4) the larger number of girls under 21 are included as
well as the adults in the estimate.
(St. James’s Gazette, 12 July 1888: 4)
The Toynbee Hall delegation was granted an interview with Theodore and
Frederick Bryant. They did not manage to reflect this in their letter of 12 July but
86 Accounting and emancipatory practice
the directors’ counter claims were published the day after. They clearly felt it important
to engage over the disclosures. The directors maintained that the average wage had
not fallen in the immediate past to around 4–6s, if they admitted that wages were
lower due to the bad summer, many girls staying in the factory rather than doing
summer jobs. They tried to justify their average figure of 11s 2d suggesting it was
based on a period of some months ‘including part of the summer’. Two forewomen
were produced to support the view that there were no legitimate grievances, one of
these pointing out that ‘her niece, 14, had earned 13s in a recent week’. The Toynbee
Hall team were left largely unmoved. That wages were poor remained clear and the
firm had not denied that the average wage was based on a sample excluding children
(they indeed referred to the ‘average adult wage’) and including the wax-match
makers.48 On 17 July 1888 St. James’s Gazette reported a further statement from the
Toynbee Hall team following a further investigation. While admitting that fines had
recently diminished they maintained that the girls’ complaints were substantially
correct. The directors had had to admit ‘after reference to their books’ that the prac-
tice of deducting three pence per week from the packers’ wages did in fact happen.49
The team confirmed that the average wage was not estimated to their satisfaction,
again returning to the contrast between accounting profit/dividends and the poor
wages and conditions. And they added further themes, giving further weight to the
role of publicity.
We are convinced that even the question of low wages, important as it is, is but
a part of the wide question of the whole relation between employers and
employed. To say nothing of the want of sympathy which we have observed
on the part of the directors and the dislike and fear on the part of the girls, the
present strike provides unanswerable evidence of the deplorable relations
which exist … They receive during the greater part of the year a wage so small
as to be totally insufficient to maintain decent existence … No evidence …
[was] … offered of attempts to improve material and social conditions. All this
time the company is dividing among its shareholders a phenomenally high div-
idend … This dividend has hitherto been accepted without question; but among
the shareholders there must surely be many who will now insist that the present
dispute should be made the beginning of a better state of things.
(St. James’s Gazette, 17 July 1888: 12)
Such was the stark contrast being exposed (even accepting Bryant and May’s own
figures), newspapers in general were bringing pressure on Bryant and May, even to
some extent The Times, which was more clearly one of the leading papers aligned to
the directors’ view.50 Accounting’s aura of facticity was serving labour and the social-
istic rather than the capitalistic even here. Socialists too could see a value in empha-
sising the ‘factual’. The liberal St. James’s Gazette expressed concern that the stark
contrast, in a context when Bryant and May had no valid excuses for paying such low
wages, could lead to unrest and encourage socialist praxis, making an earnest plea to
Bryant and May and all companies in their position:
Messrs. Bryant and May have not so suffered from depression of trade as to
be unable to be generous without a too severe strain on their resources. On the
Accounting and emancipatory practice 87
contrary, it seems pretty certain that their profits have been very great, and that
their shares were a desirable possession. We think – we say again, that they, and
others in their position, would do well to reflect on the effect likely to be pro-
duced by the spectacle of a company making 25 or 30 per cent. out of the labour
of girls who earn, taking the year all round, eleven shillings a week: not very
much. The effect of such a spectacle can only be to greatly encourage that mis-
chievous interference of the Socialists which has been complained of in the pres-
ent case. No reasonable man desires to see the State, and still less the agitator,
interfere largely in the relations of employer or employed; but it is useless and
foolish to shut our eyes to acknowledged facts. There is nothing more certain at
this time than that “grinding the faces of the poor” – to use the old and expres-
sive phrase – would be considered by many, if not to justify, at least to excuse
interferences even of a very rough kind.
(St. James Gazette cited in The Link, 28 July1888: 1)
Thus, Bryant and May struggled to mobilise counter publicity.51 Aside from the
Toynbee Hall team (see MDM 12 July 1888) and the numerous reporters, negotia-
tions were held with the London Trades Council (deputations being received on 16
and 17 July).52 The latter were crucial to the ending of the strike on 19 July 1888
(MDM 17 July 1888). It was unusual that the Council had seen fit to negotiate on
behalf of this relatively unskilled female group of workers. The strike clearly had
assumed significance for this body.53 The match girls agreed to return to work hav-
ing achieved quite a bit more than the ‘full surrender’ of their position.54 Indeed they
and their allies could in many ways – and this is the view of the bulk of labour and
union history – claim victory in respect of this particular struggle. Some saw it in
these terms at the time, notably the Liberal Radical of 28 July 1888, which reported:
‘The workers of Bryant and May’s factory have reason to thank Mrs. Besant for
her disinterested efforts on their behalf … The Directors have made a number
of concessions which will very considerably improve the conditions of the
girls … The emancipation of the workers is no party question; it should be
subservient to no political or religious creed; the welfare of humanity is surely
the desire of every honest man and woman. All praise to those who dare to be
practical as well as theoretical.’
(cutting kept in SD)
The sacked girls were re-instated. No one involved in the strike was to be dis-
criminated against. The system of fines was withdrawn (although the directors felt
this constrained their disciplinary weapons to more severe ones). Increases in wages,
admittedly small, were granted. And the Board promised to look into the provision
of a canteen (one was subsequently provided – previously the match girls had to eat
in the factory, amongst all its fumes). Finally the Board agreed to welcome the found-
ing of a match-maker’s union. The union was established, with Besant as the first
secretary overseeing strong early participation. Bryant and May gave it an official
welcome, suggesting that thereafter any grievances could be directly communicated
88 Accounting and emancipatory practice
to management. This was seen as a step forward relative to the alternative of exposure
to the public via external publicity! Wilberforce Bryant was still feeling the need to
engage in a counter publicity at Bryant and May’s AGM of 29 January 1889:
‘… in moving the adoption of the report [Wilberforce Bryant] stated that in the
middle of the year they [ie. the board] were annoyed by outsiders with reference
to their work-people, which for a time disorganised the works, involving extra
worry to the management, and causing a slight diminution of business … the
women employed by them received 15 to 25% more wages than the same class
of hands could earn in other factories in East London engaged in similar works.
He had been told by a gentleman who was acquainted with the operatives of the
North of England that the money Bryant and May’s hands received was at least
10% higher than the same class of hands got in several of the large towns in the
North of England. The report was adopted.’
(reported in St. James’s Gazette, 30 January 1889 and filed in SD)
About the last people one would expect to find advocating increased pay are the
Directors of Bryant and May Limited. Yet at the external meeting of the share-
holders on August 12th, all the discourse was about increased remuneration, and
Mr. Wilberforce Bryant was warmly in favour of it. Our readers will not be much
surprised when they learn that the increase proposed was in the pay of the
Directors themselves who are to get a miserable £8,000 a year between them.
And it was carried.55
(The Labour Elector, 24 August 1889, cutting filed in SD, same date)
Our suggests that the socialist agitators and those aligned with them refined to
some extent their usage and appreciation of accounting during the strike. The
Toynbee Hall investigators, for example, called for additional, more disaggregated,
disclosure in respect of wages as a result of their investigations. There were other calls
for more and better disclosures, including from Besant. The strike’s outcome con-
fined for the agitators that accounting publicity was something that could be usefully
mobilised in industrial conflict. Besant had been encouraged in her view, consistent
with that of Champion, that publicity of ‘facts’ could help rectify social injustices.
This was reflected in her ‘Labour Statistics’ published in the Pall Mall Gazette
(23 February 1889), an article actually prompted by the match girls’ dispute in that
it followed a request made of Besant by Burnett, Labour correspondent of the Board
of Trade, for more information about the strike. Besant supported Burnett’s concern
Accounting and emancipatory practice 89
to gather and publish social information. If publicity was not a panacea, it was
a helpful force:
Knowledge of the amount of wages paid in different trades, of the cost of living,
and so on, will not solve the social problem, nor render to the workman his due;
but they will guide him in many a perplexity, throw light on many a wrong, and
supply the material for solid arguments.
(Pall Mall Gazette, 23 February 1889)
She praised Burnett’s statistical reports and his papers in the Board of Trade Journal
for having ‘attracted much public attention’ and ‘given rise to comments in the
press’. Besant lamented the poor response to Burnett’s various surveys. She declared
that she would like to see ‘reliable returns of wages in various staple industries
disclosed to the public’ and ‘a record of cost of living over a long enough period
(at least a century)’. She wanted such information readily accessible, indeed pro-
actively disclosed, to the public:
Besant was motivated by a desire to see publicity linked to social well-being and
in this regard problematised conventional distinctions between company accounting
disclosures and social statistics, echoing an earlier blurring of such distinctions
(Burchell et al., 1980, Gallhofer and Haslam, 1993, 1995). Besant also developed
a contextual, contingency, perspective in suggesting that the strategy of publicity
had a greater chance of success in some cases than it did in others. In her ‘The Next
Point of Attack’ (The Link, 4 August 1888: 1), Besant elaborates on the conditions
under which an action can lead to victory. Firstly, there needs to be a case ‘where there
are wrongs glaring enough to compel universal admission as to the injustice with
which the workers are treated’. And:
Secondly, the industry in which they are employed must be prosperous. That
which fetched the public in the case of Bryant and May was the contrast between
the fat dividend of the shareholder and the lean allowance of the match-maker.
If Bryant and May had only been earning two or three per cent., our appeal
would have been fallen on death ears. … Therefore the dividend of the concern
against whom our next operations are to be undertaken must be over five
per cent.
(The Link, 4 August 1888: 1)
Accounting disclosure was a focus of the strategy. Besant stressed the importance
of giving further publicity to more typically suppressed voices, principally the voices
90 Accounting and emancipatory practice
of the poor and the workers (and working women especially):
In the case of the Match Girls it voiced their complaints, and forced them on the
attention of the public, and what it has done for this one class of the oppressed
it must do, one after the other for every such class …56
(The Link, 4 August 1888: 1)
… the very foundation stone of our position is that capital … namely, capital in
the hands of those who are not workers … has no rights at all. Its existence – in
such hands – is itself a wrong, demanding instant remedy … in labour disputes,
we are always on the side of the workers …
(The Labour Elector, 8 June 1889: 12)
In this context, Champion switched the focus of his attention away from the match
girls58 and on to Brunner, Mond and Co, analysis of which became a major feature of
The Labour Elector. Brunner, Mond and Co. was a chemical company located at
Northwich, North West England. It especially captivated Champion from 1888 for
a number of reasons, including a factor that fitted well with a message of Champion’s
new journal. It was a capitalistic business with a similar history to Bryant and May.
The company had risen from a small partnership of relatively humble origins to a
listed limited company recording huge financial success even in the depressed con-
ditions of the late nineteenth century. The further significant point was that John
Tomlinson Brunner, a founder and the continuing head of the company, was the
Liberal MP for Northwich. In strongly advocating that labour be represented by an
independent labour party, Champion was keen to undermine the mainstream Liberals
of the time. Here was an opportunity to mobilise criticism of a Liberal MP and point
to the affiliation of mainstream Liberal and capitalistic anti-labour interests. Moreover,
Brunner, Mond had already been the focus of Champion’s critique some two years ear-
lier when, in a letter to The Star, he had attempted to expose its ‘inhuman conditions
of labour’ (see The Labour Elector, August 1888: 2). His efforts in this line are reflected
Accounting and emancipatory practice 91
in an 1889 commentary of The Echo as follows:
For some months past Mr. H. H. Champion … has issued a little weekly paper
called THE LABOUR ELECTOR. Apparently it chief purpose is to attack
capitalists who happen to belong to the Liberal Party. For example, it has
fastened upon Mr. J. T. Brunner with the pertinacity of a sleuth-hound.
(The Echo, 8 June 1889: 12)
We propose in this and following issues, to give at some length the story of the
origin and growth of one of the most commercially successful of the monopolies
which are at present extracting tribute from the long suffering workers of this
country. The facts here given have been carefully verified, and may be taken as
absolutely accurate. We venture to think that a study of this history will prove
instructive as well as amusing, or, besides the personal application of the facts,
they throw a good deal of light on debated economical points. He who remembers
and repeats what will be here recorded will be furnished with the most complete
answer possible to many a hackneyed argument used against the emancipation
of Labour from the thraldom of Capital. … since the head of the firm is, on polit-
ical platforms, an ardent democrat, an enemy of monopoly, and general “Friend
of Man”, who uses his money to buy a seat in Parliament, to subsidise the Liberal
party, to keep at his heels a pack of fawning “Labour representatives”, and to
employ Irish journalists to write up the woes of the unfortunate tenantry with
whose grievances the Liberal party are now bound up, it becomes very instruc-
tive to learn how these riches have come into his hands, and to follow his
commercial history.
(The Labour Elector, 1 November 1888: 1–2)
The Labour Elector informs its readers that Brunner had been employed as a clerk
in a chemical works at Winnington, Northwich. Here he teamed up with Ludwig
Mond, a chemist at the works, to patent a method of alkali manufacture. They estab-
lished their own alkali manufacturing works at Winnington in 1872. It is stressed
that by the late 1880s, after the business had become a limited company, Brunner
92 Accounting and emancipatory practice
and Mond had accumulated and continued to accumulate enormous financial wealth
from this enterprise. Champion points out that additionally Brunner and Mond acted
as Managing Directors and received £1,500 each for their services. The article
emphasises that the wealth and income manifested within the short period of sixteen
years and questioned how this had been possible:
… [they] held between them no less than 29,391 of the ordinary shares of the
company. On the 22nd October last the market value of each such share was
£35 13s. 4d. Consequently the stake that these two gentlemen own today in
the business they commenced in 1872 with borrowed capital, amounts to
£1,048,279!…The last half-yearly balance sheet of the company shows it is
paying a dividend of 25% out. This, on the capital held by Messrs. Brunner &
Mond, 29,391 £10 shares, represents an income of £73,477 10s a year between
them! … wealth also may be honourable. But, when there is a sudden jump from
poverty to wealth, the matter wants looking into, and that is what we are doing
with the wonderful adventures of Mr John Tomlinson Brunner, once the
impecunious clerk at Widnes, and now the millionaire MP for Northwich.
(The Labour Elector, 15 November 1888: 4)
Champion begins a more detailed analysis with a focus upon the 1881 prospectus.
The price Brunner and Mond asked for the business that ‘they had started previously
under the humble condition we here described’ was £200,000. This was a ‘modest’
sum ‘squeezed out of the labour of their white slaves in eight short years’. He sug-
gests that ‘one or two comparative calculations’ of interest ‘especially to our workmen
readers’ would clarify that it was not possible for a worker to save such a sum over
even a lifetime (The Labour Elector, 15 November 1888: 4):
Let us, for example, assume that the advocates of thrift are right. These gentle-
men practice what they preach, for they seldom give away anything but advice.
Suppose that advice were taken by a couple of men working for Messrs.
BRUNNER, MOND & Co. at 18s. per week, and that, with a view to amassing
wealth for old age, they practiced self-denial to the extent of keeping themselves
and their families on 13s. a week, and put away 5s. a week each in the Savings’
Bank. How long would these two working men take to amass £200,000 [ie.
£100,000 each]? Just seven thousand six hundred and ninety-two years and sixteen
weeks. Clearly then Messrs. BRUNNER & MOND found a much more speedy
way of obtaining capital than is afforded by practising the virtue of abstinence.
(The Labour Elector, 15 November 1888: 5)
Having referred to the workers as ‘white slaves’, Champion added to the picture of
contrast by pointing out that a trade union delegation had asked for a rise of two
shillings in the wages with the result that Brunner, Mond not only refused the rise
but simply sacked every union member. Champion points in this context to what he
sees as the hypocrisy of Brunner who was proclaiming continuing support of Irish
tenants to form associations similar to trade unions. Such a contrast in fortunes,
Accounting and emancipatory practice 93
Champion suggests, was scarcely reported in the public realm because Brunner had
‘bought the silence of the great Liberal party and the Liberal press’ (The Labour Elector,
15 November 1888). Meanwhile, as The Labour Elector of 16 February 1889 was to
report, Brunner proclaimed the great and ‘honest’ financial success of the company
at the AGM:
I am very pleased to meet you here to-day again, and to congratulate you and
ourselves on the continued prosperity of this concern. You see we are enabled to
pay the handsome dividend of 35 per cent per annum, and to carry forward the
large balance of £29,647 8s. 5d. I can say, as I have said before, that this divi-
dend is honestly earned, and there is every prospect of the future prosperity of
the Company being equal to the past.
(The Labour Elector, 16 February 1889: 4)
On 15 December 1888 (13), The Labour Elector printed the first half-yearly balance
sheet of the new limited company. Champion analysed the balance sheet to question
further the appropriateness of the £200,000 paid to Brunner and Mond to effect the
transfer of the business.59 One of the constituent items was some £126,000 for fac-
tory works. According to the prospectus, this was the cost to the vendors. Champion
points out that no evidence had been given to support this statement. And he notes
that details of the valuation constituting the remaining £74,000 were absent. He also
draws readers’ attention to the increasing size of equity (or, equivalently, increased
assets) in the balance sheet – increasing in spite of the high dividend due to earnings
retention and the attracting of capital to the business. Champion also highlights that
of the gross profit for the half-year, interest, Directors’ salaries and fees and ‘the lion’s
share’ of the dividend were paid to Messrs. Brunner and Mond. He concludes that
‘the transformation of the business from the private concern of these two gentlemen
into a limited liability company was quite a success, so far as they were concerned’
(The Labour Elector, 15 December 1888). The returns to the owners and owner-direc-
tors are again contrasted with employee experience:
And their workmen? their white slaves, whose arduous and unhealthy toil made
all that wealth, they thought also of them in this their hour of prosperity? Well,
no, not exactly; or, if they did, it was only to devise fresh schemes whereby the
toil being made yet more arduous and unhealthy, the dividends on the beloved
Ordinary Shares would mount higher and higher. And mount they certainly did,
in an astonishing degree; but the how and the why we must defer to our next
issue.
(The Labour Elector, 15 December 1888: 13)
Champion noted that his objective of publicising the story beyond The Labour
Elector was very soon successful. The Evening News, in a leader, published a story about
the treatment of the workmen at Northwich, citing The Labour Elector. The article
asks The Star, Mr Brunner’s paper (in that he was the major shareholder)60 to respond.
Champion reports that criticism of Brunner, Mond was made in Parliament. This
94 Accounting and emancipatory practice
prompted T. O’Connor, MP, an ally of Brunner, to launch there a counter-attack,
portraying Brunner as a good employer and suggesting that that was why he was MP
for Northwich. Champion took the opportunity to retort:
Mr. O’CONNOR’s next plea on behalf of his master, is that “Mr. BRUNNER is
concerned with the financial part, and the financial part alone, of the firm.” That
is to say that, so long as the men work so as to give him his 50 per cent divi-
dend, he does not much mind how they do it. “He has never employed, he has
never dismissed one solitary man in the works.” Why should he? Has he not got
managers and foremen at Northwich, as well as an editor in London, to do his
dirty and unpleasant work? Why should he do it himself? … If an election took
place tomorrow in Northwich, Mr. Brunner would have to fight hard to keep the
seat at all; if it took place after we have finished his history in the Labour Elector,
Mr. Brunner will probably decline to stand.
(The Labour Elector, 15 December 1888: 14)
The next issue of The Labour Elector, of 5 January 1889, published the accounts of
the company for the half-year ending 31 December 1881. The profits were again con-
trasted with the poor working conditions. Champion calculates, with reference to the
published accounts, that the cost of introducing an eight-hour day at Brunner, Mond,
assuming the workers were paid the same amount for the shorter shift as the longer,
would be small relative to the profits:
GRANTING that such work must be done, unhealthy though it be, there is no
reason (but expense) why the 12 hour shift should not be changed to 8, fresh
men being set on to work the fresh shift. A man might live through the 8 hours
shift; he is now being killed, more or less swiftly, by the 12. Well, what be
the cost of the fresh batch of men? Three hundred men, say, at a pound a week
(the present workers are receiving about 18s.), would be £15,600 in the
year. The present profits of the company are about £200,000 a year. From such
a sum £15,600 would be scarcely missed, and £185,000 would still remain to
be annually divided between Messrs. BRUNNER, MOND & Co.
(The Labour Elector, 5 January 1889: 7)
Such an analysis was aimed at countering the ‘most effective opponents of the
Eight Hours’ Day at the present time … officials of Trade Unions who protest that
such a reduction of working hours would reduce employers’ profits to vanishing
point, and thus lead to the closing of their mills and factories and the dismissal of
their “hands” ’ (The Labour Elector, 15 June 1889: 6). In seeking to counter the
opponents of the eight-hour day, Champion went beyond his analysis of Brunner,
Mond:
One analysis of the Albany Spinning Company Limited which maintained that
a reduction in the return on share capital from 13.5 to 8.5 per cent would be the
effect of paying the same wage to employees for an eight-hour shift as was currently
paid for a nine-hour shift – an acceptable reduction for Champion – gave rise to
a response from one of the readers of the paper to the effect that Champion’s analysis
had been too generous to the employers:
I think your practical exemplification of the result of the Eight Hour movement
is likely to be very useful, but it occurs to me that you have made your calcula-
tion on the wrong basis with the result of making the case worse for the
employer than it would be in fact. There is nothing in the fact of shorter hours
being worked to reduce the demand for goods, but exactly the reverse, more men
being employed and having money to spend. Consequently, instead of deducting
one-ninth from sales on one side, and cost of raw material and sundries on the
other, I think you should simply add one-ninth of item for wages, which would
have the profit balance £840 instead of £696.
(The Labour Elector, 22 June 1889: 10)
… every Gas Stoker has the satisfaction of knowing that while he is earning 2s.
8d. in wages, he is making 12s. 41/2 d. for Capital. It will be well for the stok-
ers, while they are at their work, to remember that they fill three mouthpieces
for the shareholders’ benefit, and only the fourth for their own. Could there be
any stronger proof that the only cause of poverty and overwork is that the work-
ers have to keep the idlers? But if the Gas Stokers keep on at their agitation they
will soon be able to say with BYRON –
I have seen the people, like o’er burdened asses,
Kick off their burdens, meaning the upper classes.
(The Labour Elector, 29 June 1889: 11)
BUT, strange to tell, even these extraordinary efforts to absorb the wealth
produced by Mr. BRUNNER’s white slaves were found to be inadequate, and
a device was invented which is, we think, unique in the history of Limited
Liability Companies. It may be that it was legal; most probably it was; for your
BRUNNERS are always, or almost always, sharp enough to keep within the law.
But surprising as our revelations concerning BRUNNER, MOND & Co., have
been up to this point, that which we have now to tell reduces by comparison all
that has gone before to mere commonplace. The operation belongs to the half-
year succeeding the one we are now considering; therefore we will say no more
about it until next week.
(The Labour Elector, 26 January 1889: 9–10)
Having hinted at this device for hiding or deflecting attention from the high prof-
its of Brunner, Mond, Champion attempts to negotiate with Brunner through the
pages of The Labour Elector. If Brunner agreed to introduce the eight-hour day, pro-
claims Champion, ‘we will stay our pen at this point and never write another line
either against his political actions or his administration of the Winnington works’
(The Labour Elector, 26 January 1889: 10). With Brunner failing to respond to this,
the next issue of the paper brings attention to the dilution of share capital via a bonus
issue to reduce the dividend as a percentage of the nominal value of shares issued
(The Labour Elector, 2 February 1889: 1–4). Later, Champion notes that his interpre-
tation of the share issue had not been questioned (The Labour Elector, 16 February
1889: 4). The balance sheet as at 30 June 1884 constituted the accounts immediately
preceding the capital increase. After printing this, Champion notes:
As the above set of Accounts are those immediately preceding the “act of trans-
formation” by which Mr. BRUNNER, by a stroke of the pen, doubled the
amount of his capital in the company, it is interesting to know what was exactly
the rate of profit produced for him during those six months by the exhausting
toil of men … As the Accounts show, the profit made during the half-year was
£69,282. Deducting the £6,288 required for the Preference Shareholders we
have £62,994 left for the Ordinary Shareholders. This represents no less than
56 per cent … No wonder Mr. BRUNNER thought it high time to adopt the
expedient of doubling the nominal amount of his Shares, so as to endeavour to
conceal the enormous profit …
(The Labour Elector, 2 March 1889: 5)
Accounting and emancipatory practice 97
Champion also questions the appropriateness of a further share issue with reference
to the balance sheet as at 31 December 1884 (The Labour Elector, 9 March 1889: 5).
And – problematising the status of the chartered accountant in the process – he
criticises an accounting practice of aggregation which he suggests is aligned to the
capitalist’s concern to disclose minimalist information:
This practice of including two separate things in one item may be, for the
Directors, a convenient system of account keeping but we are surprised at its
receiving the sanction of any auditor who signs himself a chartered accountant.
(The Labour Elector, 9 March 1889: 5)
In The Labour Elector of 23 March 1889 (5) Champion returns to the increases in
reserves and the issues of shares:
It was only wanted [ie. the transfer to reserves and the issues of shares] by
Mr BRUNNER and Mr MOND, the promoters, first, for its own sake; second
to hide the shame of their monstrous dividends; and third to get others to share
the anxieties and responsibilities of the concern with them. But, we repeat the
money was not required for the business. The profits already yielded were more
than enough to provide for all additions, developments and expansions. But
these profits were taken away to other investments, and fresh capital was created,
and thenceforward that fresh capital has to get its profits and its dividends just
as if it has been necessary to the industry. Thus Capital is always adding to the
load which is first placed upon the shoulders of Labour.
(The Labour Elector, 23 March 1889: 5)
He points out that in spite of such increases, Brunner was still not prepared to
introduce the eight-hour shift (The Labour Elector, 23 March 1889: 5). In The Labour
Elector of 27 April 1889, Champion again points to the continuing increase in
assets/equity in spite of the high dividends being paid, with reference to the accounts
of the half year ending 31 December 1885.63
Champion also used the accounts in the context of exposing Brunner’s monopolis-
tic and ‘protectionist’ practice. Referring to an item in the balance sheet in respect of
Mersey, Salt and Brine Co., Champion went on to reflect the particular nature of the
benefit to the company entailed therein by citing Brunner’s statement to the extraor-
dinary general meeting of August 1884:
Your Directors are of opinion that the safe way to maintain this monopoly is to
enlarge your works. With this object in view, the Directors have entered into an
agreement with the Mersey Salt and Brine Co. The essence of this agreement is
that they grant to us the monopoly of the use of their pipes so far as the carriage
of brine for the manufacture of Ammonia Soda is concerned.
(The Labour Elector, 2 March 1889: 6)
98 Accounting and emancipatory practice
In the 26 January 1889 issue of The Labour Elector, Champion adds to his exposure
by noting that not only did the company pay low wages and have the employees work
in conditions that destroyed their lives and happiness, it also impacted negatively by
polluting a river by pumping it with brine (8).64
By 19 January 1889, Champion had felt able to report that the publicity he was
giving to Brunner, Mond was bringing about some changes for the better, encouraging
him to disclose more:
With respect to the conditions of the workmen – the object of all our thoughts –
we hear from our friend Mr Litster that our blows are beginning to tell, and that
signs of improvement are appearing here and there. But they are so trifling to be
hardly worth mentioning, and they certainly will not cause us to abate our
efforts one jot.
(The Labour Elector, 19 January 1889: 10)
The journal reprints a report of a public meeting held in Appleby that had initially
appeared in the East Cumberland News. This discusses working conditions at Brunner,
Mond and the impact The Labour Elector had on changing them:
But since Mr Champion had made his exposure the men had been allowed to
go off after working 101/2 hours, instead of doing the double shift. They had also
dispensed with the fining system, and also the fines of the shiftmen for losing
three-questers during the week. Mr Brünner had admitted to him personally,
Mr. Champion had done a deal of good to the employes of Brünner, Mond and Co.
(The Labour Elector, 18 May 1889: 10)
In once again claiming that the publicity was having a positive impact and in the
context of a further death of one of ‘Brunner’s white slaves’, Champion re-iterates that
yet more pressure had to be brought to bear:
How can we better align accounting and emancipation today? To help contribute
further insights so as to inform reflection upon this question, we here focus upon an
accounting phenomenon of relatively recent times. Building upon existing contribu-
tions in the literature and reflecting on-going work, we seek, through a set of brief
analyses, to gain some further critical appreciation of a ‘social accounting’ phenome-
non that has manifested over the last 40 years. These last 40 years have witnessed
something of a take off, followed by a subsequently interesting trajectory, in the idea
and practice of a social accounting (Gray 1999). This social accounting has been char-
acterised as challenging conventional accounting, involving a fusion of concerns about
accounting’s content, form and social role. And, on the face of it, it has been consti-
tuted in efforts to go beyond a narrow instrumentalism towards an appreciation,
informed by critical reflection, of ‘what really matters’ to people, including in the
governance of social organisations. What can we learn from this social accounting
phenomenon? The question is a rhetorical one. How can one respond to the challenge
to learn everything that there is to learn? The challenge is a substantive one. The
social accounting phenomenon refers to a vast set of episodes and developments
that have manifested throughout the world. Furthermore, we must consider what
attempting a substantive critical theoretical appreciation – informed by various the-
oretical advances, including postmodern insights – involves. On the one hand, it prop-
erly involves explorations of these episodes and developments that delve into the
specificities, complexities and ambiguities of the various social accounting manifes-
tations in relation to the wider context of which they are part. On the other, if one is
to avoid the sort of myopia that can problematically manifest in focusing upon the
particular and the specific, it involves recognising key structural forces and seeking
to develop a substantive critical thematisation that is also contextually informed. No
wonder relatively little has been done by way of responding to the challenge referred
to. In respect of this area, a limited number of social analyses and overviews of
accounting in action have at least touched upon some aspects of episodes involving
106 Is social accounting the soul of justice?
social accounting. For instance, Burchell et al. (1985) is an especially notable
contribution (see also Hopwood et al. 1994, Robson 1994), and Gray et al. (1995a,
1996) and Gray and Bebbington (2001) summarise a wealth of insight. Yet clearly
this is only scratching the surface in relation to what can potentially be done. And in
this regard the existing studies acknowledge the difficulties of constructing the
dimensions of a substantive critical appreciation (see Gray 1999: 15). Thus, we can
only make a very partial contribution here towards filling the gap. In spite of
the partial character of prior studies, we can build upon previous appreciations in the
literature – re-interpreting and extending them – to a much greater extent than in
the empirical analyses of our earlier chapters. Yet we must eschew, in the context of
the limited available space, the elaboration of something akin to the recent history of
social accounting in critical theoretical terms. Nevertheless, our concern here is in
some ways to extend critical appreciation of a number of key episodes and develop-
ments from the late 1960s onwards involving the mobilisation of social accounting.
Our selection of episodes and developments for analysis and re-appraisal, from the
vast and rich tapestry that has manifested, has been informed by existing literature
on social accounting. The selection has been made with a view to offering some key
insights and stimulating further research and engagement towards the realisation of
social accounting’s emancipatory potential.
Before overviewing the episodes and developments reviewed here, we can elaborate
and substantiate more explicitly why we believe, given an interest in better aligning
accounting and emancipation, that episodes and manifestations helping make up the
social accounting phenomenon of relatively recent times form a worthy focus of
analysis. As we have already mentioned, social accounting has been mobilised as an
accounting challenging conventional accounting and, on the face of it, as an account-
ing reflecting a concern to go beyond a narrow instrumentalsim (cf. Lehman and
Tinker 1997). Thus, the mobilisation of social accounting is suggestive of accounting
being aligned with the idea of emancipation as understood here. Further, a number
of discourses and movements have promoted the notion of social accounting more
evidently as emancipatory and indeed some have done so explicitly, including mobil-
ising the construct of emancipatory accounting in this context (Tinker 1984a,b,
1985, Gray 1992, 1999: 3, 12–13, Owen et al. 1997, Bebbington 1999, 2001). Further,
commentators see the phenomenon of social accounting in relatively recent times to
be a significant one. Social accounting’s take off period has been characterised as the
‘heyday’ of social accounting and even as constituting the emergence of ‘the social
accounting movement’1 (Zadek and Evans 1993, Gray et al. 1996, Zadek et al. 1997,
Owen et al. 2000: 81). There are also broader contextual factors that help justify the
analysis of social accounting we are concerned to contribute to here. The take off in
social accounting in the late twentieth century – around the late 1960s and in the
1970s – was in respect of the business organisation in particular (Gray et al. 1996).
This is suggestive of a number of negative and positive potentialities for the broader
context that are appropriately explored. For instance, this increased attention given
to business could have displaced attention from other entities or activities, thus
potentially posing an obstacle to emancipatory work through social accounting in
these other fields. Or, the increased emphasis given to business here could properly
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 107
have reflected the significance, or increasing significance, of business organisations in
the world, so that attempts to transform them through accounting may have had par-
ticular emancipatory promise. Another factor is that, as we shall elaborate, the context
of social accounting’s take off and subsequent trajectory has been one of interesting
and significant socio-political tensions and dynamics. For us, then, the manifestations
of social accounting and the struggle to capture social accounting in this context con-
stitute focuses that are fertile for the gaining of insights and inspiration towards the
furtherance of an emancipatory project involving accounting’s mobilisation today.
We seek here to bring out emancipatory and repressive dimensions of social
accounting in a number of key differentiated and overlapping episodes and manifes-
tations from the relatively recent historical context. We are concerned initially to
gain some insights from an analysis broadly contrasting counter information systems
type interventions mobilising social accounting – taking pressure group and social
activist interventions as exemplars – with the mobilisations of social accounting by
business organisations. We build into our comparative analysis an appreciation of the
contextual dynamics of recent decades. Thus we also seek to gain and convey a sense
of discontinuities as well as continuities in respect of both counter systems type activ-
ity and business interventions over the period from the 1970s to very recent times.
With regard to counter information systems type activity, particular attention is
given to the work of Counter Information Services (CIS), a group of social activists
operating in the UK in the 1970s with ostensibly a strong radical orientation and
critical emancipatory intent. In respect of business interventions, we summarise
key insights for the period of interest. And we offer brief commentary upon
aspects of the recent work of the Institute of Social and Ethical Accountability (ISEA)
and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), apparently collaborative but strongly
business orientated mobilisations of social accounting in the ‘globalisation’ context
of today. We are then concerned to gain insights from a review of mobilisations of
social accounting by government and the accountancy profession. Here, we overview
the profession’s mobilising of The Corporate Report, and parallel government activity,
again in the UK in the 1970s. Further, we go on to seek to learn from an assessment
of certain aspects of academic interventions in respect of social accounting over
relatively recent times. The focused, if brief, explorations, here, are prefaced by
an overview, integral and geared to the subsequent analyses, of key contextual
characteristics and developments and by further introductory elaboration upon
social accounting’s delineation in this context. The relative emphasis upon the UK
in our choice of interventions here reflects in part our geographical location, but also
our view that the UK has witnessed key contextual dynamics and some key episodes
and interventions involving manifestations of social accounting that are also
reflective and to some extent illustrative of more global developments (cf. Gray et al.
1996).
Of course, the committee met at a time when the social was more visible and
legitimate. Explicit attempts were being made to produce new intersections of
accounting and the social. Effort was being devoted to reforming accounting in
the name of the social. All too clearly the situation is very different today. The
legitimacy of the social apparently is not so great. The economic has once again
monopolized attention and action.
(Hopwood 1985: 375)
The late 1970s witnessed the oil crisis – a restriction of oil supplies leading to
a substantial increase in energy costs – and a recession of worldwide impact. This
exacerbated the profits squeeze that was associated with the perceived power of
labour and the unions, with wage rises recorded as outstripping high levels of infla-
tion and disruptive strikes being recorded as on the increase. Hegemonic forces,
reflected in the media and the transition of Western states, exchanged a social dem-
ocratic and corporatist polity for a more aggressively capitalistic neo-liberalism.
Emphasising the formal political orientation, Stuart Hall (1983) refers to ‘The Great
Moving Right Show’ in depicting this contextual change, a change enhanced by the
formal ascendancy of Thatcher and Reagan and buoyed in the 1980s by the Cold War
victory (Hobsbawm 1995; see also Lehman and Tinker 1987). The unleashing of rel-
atively enhanced market pressures was now seen as the better mechanism for disci-
plining labour, rather than the subtle interventionist building of industrial harmony
and co-ordination. An even freer hand was given to business, as hegemonic forces
pushed to reduce the power of the unions, advance privatisation programmes and role
back state commitments and interventions, including through a reduction in leg-
islative and quasi-legislative control restricting business.4 Stress was placed by hege-
monic forces in the Western capitalistic context on the need to compete in global
markets and such a policy was supported by interventions such as equating to
a greater, if still strategic, liberalisation of global markets. The repressive state could
increasingly appeal to global structural conditions and the pressures of world compe-
tition to justify poor labour practices and inadequate legislative and quasi-legislative
standards and regulations. The same sort of rhetoric was also put out by apologists for
the huge salaries of some corporate directors and for lax tax regimes: it was a rhetoric
that in all these cases could have been seriously deflated by the mobilising of sub-
stantive global as opposed to local regulations. Democracy, crudely in one of its pop-
ular senses as the exercising of power by the people, a continuing threat to relatively
powerful established interests, was not just heavily manipulated, it was increasingly
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 111
suppressed. A less fettered global capitalism gave relatively more power to global,
transnational business in relation to nation state governments, if some of the more
powerful governments (notably the US) appeared to welcome aspects of this as an aid
to polity geared to maintaining and enhancing current structure (Bailey et al. 1994,
Monbiot 2001). In the absence of a properly functioning world parliament, this con-
text of globalisation equated to a constraining of democratic forces (Held and
McGrew 2000, Monbiot 2002). Monbiot (2001) refers here to the corporatisation of
Britain and much else besides: that is, the pervasive influence of business organisa-
tions in this context. Political dependencies and interdependencies, global business
influence and the functioning of global hegemonic forces became increasingly appar-
ent. The potential for acts at one location of the global system to impact at another
some distance away has been enhanced (Held and McGrew 2000). Monbiot (2001) sug-
gests that large transnational corporations recently accrued a tremendous influence on
supra-national bodies such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. The
United Nations, long criticised for being dominated by powerful interests of the status
quo, has been seen as increasingly coming to collaborate with big business in this regard.
If the immediate post Second World War context fostered the social democratic in
the West, the late twentieth century tended to enforce a more capitalistic polity. If
labour, the unions, new social movements and even democratic socialistic forces were
gaining influence of significance in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by the 1980s
these forces had been significantly weakened. More and more people were, it seems,
susceptible to the dynamics of big business interventions in shifting politico-
economic contexts. Concerns to protect people and even to provide basic social and
economic security were attacked. One force with strong counter hegemonic dimen-
sions that continued to grow in spite of the broader political changes, bolstered by
the weight of scientific opinion, was environmentalism, particularly in terms of
a focus on sustainability. Capturing many people’s attention, to some extent this
exerted a similar kind of pressure on business and governments to that engendered
by the earlier social responsibility and related movements. The problematic actual
and potential ecological impacts clearly cut across the boundaries of given nation
state contexts, notably in the case of global warming. Thus developments and move-
ments were further encouraged to think and act globally (Gallhofer and Haslam
1997b). As some forms of environmentalism and sustainability also stressed the case
for wider social responsibility, these broader concerns began to return to a higher
level on the agenda (Gray and Bebbington 2001).
Reddings Lane runs alongside the Lucas Formans Road battery factory. Huge
acid tanks tower over the houses in Reddings Lane, families in the road suffer
the fumes day and night. The McCrellis family say their kids choke when they’re
trying to get to sleep and always have headaches and have dizzy spells. In the
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 119
same street a three year old boy killed several of his pets for no reason. His father
works in the Lucas battery factory. A baby from Reddings Lane has been taken
into Selly Oak Hospital because it keeps getting sick. All these children had
a high concentration of lead in their blood.
(CIS 1975: 19, 21)
The Lucas report also reflects CIS’s concern to expose aspects of the multiplicity of
experiences of repression of the workers. Particular attention is given in the report to
the experiences of women workers. The low wages paid to women in the workforce,
who were mainly part-time, are highlighted, as are the higher bonus rates paid to
men relative to women for doing the same job. One female worker is reported to have
the following views in respect of her experience of assembly line work:
Lots of the women are trained to do mindless jobs and many of them are very
intelligent. Operators start feeling like cabbages. On the assembly line you get
so dulled that your mind slumps; you don’t bother to respond to people when
they talk to you and you don’t answer questions. It doesn’t seem worthwhile, you
just can’t be bothered. I think assembly work effects your brain. It’s so boring.
(CIS 1975: 5)
I’m older now. I’ve got used to it … Some of the women though, I don’t know
how they manage. I think eight out of ten of them are on tranquillisers.
They worry about getting to work in the morning if they’re on early shifts. They
worry about the kids getting to school. They worry about the piecework, then
they go home and have to worry about getting the housework done. I’ve seen
them line tranquillisers and pills up alongside their plates in the canteen like
rows of dolly mixtures.
(CIS 1975: 5)
These two citations are aimed at raising awareness about the impact of alienating
working practices on spiritual well-being and at highlighting aspects of the several
types of repression experienced by women given the various roles, including that of
worker and mother, society expects of them.
The Lucas Anti-Report also explicitly discusses strategies on the part of business
management to divide the employees of the company. For one worker, Lucas was
trying to ‘maintain fragmentation, union by union, area by area, product group by
product group’ and to divide Lucas companies and workers of different skills: ‘There’s
no communication between the groups and the areas and Lucas knows it and loves it’
(CIS 1975: 27). The Anti-Report draws attention to a job evaluation system encom-
passing twenty nine grades that were vaguely distinct, rendering plant and national
level negotiations extremely difficult: ‘The workforce is the victim of this chaos. It is
a management scheme, management administered, and its end result is a multi-
graded workforce often incapable of any sort of solidarity or cohesive activity’
120 Is social accounting the soul of justice?
(CIS 1975: 27). Throughout the year, it was further reported, senior union stewards
attended special courses on industrial relations run by Lucas that were described by
the workers as ‘a concentrated Lucas public relations and indoctrination exercise’
(CIS 1975). According to the report, the company especially tried to ensure that
workers’ representatives were loyal to the company through participation in Lucas
committees. CIS, in pursuing its critical themes in the Lucas Anti-Report, mobilise
various accountings, in various ways, including adopting a range of strategies. The
CIS reporters here indicate, à la Champion, a degree of sophistication in respect of
their usage of conventional accounting. They make the point, for instance, that the
company’s accounting was known to be cautious in respect of profit and that, even
given this, Lucas were nevertheless reporting near record high accounting profits in
1974–5, the year focused upon (CIS 1975: 8). While thus mobilising the company’s
financial accounting, the CIS team also shows technical sophistication in mounting
a critique of this accounting. They therefore buttress their argument through, and at
the same time render their report a vehicle for, the mobilisation and critique of the
actually existing accounting. They criticise associate company accounting, transfer
pricing practice, aggregation of trading figures and a failure to breakdown assets on
a geographical basis, suggesting in effect that these practices amounted to distortions
and manipulations to help hide actualities from the view of workers and the public
(CIS 1975: 9). As well as challenging and making use of Lucas’s conventional
accounting, CIS also challenge and at least in this sense make use of Lucas’s own
social accounting and employee reporting, for example, referring to the dubious
public relations’ character of the latter in the following:
The report critically reflects upon what was at stake in the change: ‘This, as Lucas
apparently boasted in a letter to banks and finance companies, serves to conceal the
actual performance of each of the individual product groups from “interested parties” –
particularly the workforce’ (CIS 1975: 9). Through a sophisticated usage and critique
of accountings, CIS thus aimed to help strengthen their reporting in relation to their
concern to create an awareness of the company’s failings vis-à-vis the welfare of the
workers.
As well as mobilising a financial economistic accounting which in part made use
of Lucas’s own reportings, the Lucas Anti-Report embraces the use of narrative. The
CIS group attempt here, at least, to tailor the narrative to reach a wide audience and
especially the Lucas workforce. Including narratives of experience is seen as helping
to bring attention to repressive practices. We have already in effect illustrated this
usage of narrative above. In elaborating upon employee conditions, where a concern
to counter Lucas’s own employee reporting is evident, a mainly narrative style is
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 121
adopted. Narrative is especially used to elaborate upon divisive management
practices and to suggest that Lucas care little about their local community. The concern
to reach a wide audience is explicitly suggested by Ridgers (1979: 327), for whom
‘dissemination of information is … central to effective counter-information’. By
transforming at least aspects of the role, scope, content, form and aura of conventional
accounting in their own reporting practice, CIS arguably facilitate alternative ways
of seeing to the mainstream. They thus on the face of it better challenge problematic
forces and align with the relatively oppressed and projects with emancipatory intent.
According to Ridgers (1979: 327), workers were brought together by the interven-
tion in respect of Lucas. Questions of content and form were explicitly considered by
CIS as a matter of strategy. For Ridgers (1979: 331), ‘counter-information is no neu-
tral artefact: its form and content need to be tailored to the political task in question’.
The Lucas Anti-Report reveals usage of a particular format or layout to emphasise the
form of immanent critique (cf. Gallhofer and Haslam 1996a). It is a format that very
much echoes Champion. Reports of financial success and ‘rational’ business plans
are sharply juxtaposed against workers’ experiences and concerns. Left-hand pages
summarise the company management’s position. Right-hand pages – in a different
typescript, emphasising the contrast – give the counter.
Counter Information Services put together their elaborations upon the situation,
strategies and practices of Lucas partly through the creative and innovative usage of
annual reports, newspapers and other publicly available information and partly
through the collecting of data and construction of information beyond that already
publicly available. Instances of the latter involved the CIS reporters talking with the
employees and the local community and reflecting interviewee opinions. Again this
echoes the practices of the nineteenth century socialist agitators discussed earlier. The
enrolling of the employees in the collecting and reporting of information is a particular
feature of the Lucas Anti-Report. Relatively close co-operation with the employees
was secured in the Lucas case. Ridgers maintained:
… we sought to make as many contacts as possible with the workforce: the report
had to be acceptable and useful to the workers. Their experience and knowledge
was an integral part of the generation and organisation of our data, and their
active involvement in preparing the report also facilitated its distribution.
(Ridgers 1979: 331)
The Lucas Anti-Report had actually been requested by Lucas shop stewards and
there was a reasonably high level of collaboration with the workforce. This approach
of CIS whereby employees are enrolled in the project reflects a concern to go beyond
a ‘privileged knower’ stance. An aspect of the potential of avoiding such a stance is
arguably indicated in that contact with the workers was maintained after the publi-
cation of an Anti-Report. For instance, co-operation over CIS’s Anti-Report of GEC
led to the founding, in collaboration with CIS, of a company-wide newspaper for
employees that sought to expose company malpractices. Giving workers a voice was
understood as better facilitating the creation and sustaining amongst the workers of
an awareness of exploitative work practices. As well as attempting to go beyond the
122 Is social accounting the soul of justice?
privileged knower, the Lucas Anti-Report, notably in its concerns to give female
workers a voice and relate their own specific grievances, relatedly reflected a type of
differentiated universalist stance to the reporting of the experience of repression.
A feature of the CIS Anti-Reporting is that it does not shy away from its political
alignment. It explicitly seeks to counter injustice and specifically in the Lucas case to
aid the workers in their struggle against the threat of redundancy. The report
explores business management strategies in terms of a conflict with labour. The
rhetoric of Lucas’s management is admitted to be effective while being attacked
(CIS 1975: 10). The workers are encouraged in the report by some elaboration upon
successes they had already achieved as well as given insights concerning the difficul-
ties they encountered in relation to this struggle. The report ends by pointing to the
necessity of workers uniting to achieve better conditions: ‘Until workers in other
divisions combine to make overall strategy a reality, all resistance to Lucas’s ruthless
company-wide rationalisation will remain isolated’ (CIS 1975: 45).
Reflecting on the interventions of CIS as illustrated in the Lucas Anti-Report, and
upon counter-information systems activity in general, one can point to some prob-
lematic dimensions or limitations of such activity in the context vis-à-vis a project
of critical emancipatory intent. One can indicate particular areas and suggest that
dimensions of the potentiality of CIS were unrealised. For example, although CIS
shows an awareness of the multiplicity of the experience of repression in referring to
women, other groups and issues, such as the experiences of different ethnicities, have
in effect been silenced. CIS’s concern to reflect the multiplicity of experiences could
have been extended further into the local and broader community. The focus upon
employees displaces attention from others and displaces the possibility of helping
other change agents, consistent with the open character of a critical theoretical
approach today. In respect to the employees, CIS could have covered more categories
of worker to better bring out experiences and impacts, including former workers
of Lucas.
One can argue that CIS show in the context what was possible in terms of counter-
information. Yet it is worth emphasising that there were limits to what CIS could do
in terms of structural impediments to their actions in the context. A specific issue
here for counter-information activity is that operating within the law poses its own
particular obstacles. For example, there are the difficulties of gaining access, by keep-
ing within the law, to the information on organisations that would be useful for the
purposes of putting together an alternative report (Stephenson 1973, Gray 1980,
Gray et al. 1996: chapter 9).11 More generally, in drawing from or acting consistently
with the practices of the context, especially the established institutional and lawful
practices, there is a danger of at least to some extent reinforcing rather than chal-
lenging the socio-political order. To argue otherwise is to fail to see the penetration
of hegemonic forces in these situated practices. What is possible is not neutral. While
we argue that the practices of the social context are not fully under the control of
hegemonic forces they are, nevertheless, heavily influenced by them. CIS in effect
worked hard to avoid such capture by adopting a deliberately critical stance that was
concerned to challenge business management and by giving an opportunity to
employees to voice their ethical opinions. Nevertheless, our suggestion is that it is
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 123
impossible to escape capture absolutely, given the imperfect character of the context.
A group concerned to engage in counter-information systems activity is trying to bal-
ance working within and against the socio-political order. For instance, it is seeking
to work at least typically within the law and at the same time to challenge the law.
Engaging in one of these activities may to some extent counter the other or displace
it from attention. Choices made in practice inevitably will be imperfect to some
extent given the context and the insurmountable tensions involved. Relatedly, if CIS
were concerned to avoid the stance of the privileged knower or the professional-expert
they could not entirely do so and this, as we have seen, involves some negation, includ-
ing displacing other interventions (Harte and Owen 1987, Gallhofer and Haslam
1997b). One can point out, in this regard, that CIS were concerned themselves to use
aspects of established professional-expert practices in terms of content, form and aura.
Another concern here is that counter-information systems type activity, including
CIS, could easily accrue a negative image in the context focused upon and thus come
to be more easily dismissed. Diverse, uncoordinated, somewhat marginal and short-
lived practices can be labeled as lacking ‘standards’ and even as eccentric by more
established forces and it is difficult to mobilise strategies to counter this. In this
regard, the various groups involved in mobilising counter information systems have,
on the face of it, scarcely acted in a unified way and a number, including CIS, have
failed to survive over a long period of time. Gray et al. (1996), albeit reserving
positive comments for CIS, echo the negative rhetoric that was possible in terms of
standards by describing ‘the priorities of some counter reports as being a “good
story” ’ that is ‘quite deliberately selective and biased’ (273) and by referring to some
producers of more radical publicities as ‘self appointed’ watchdogs (275). They also sug-
gest that publicities like CIS amount to an ‘investigative journalism’ and compare this
unfavourably with their vision of social accounting, arguing that in the reports ‘the fre-
quent expressions of writers’ opinions could be viewed as defects in the communication
process’. In this respect Gray et al. (1996: 272) comment on the ‘vivid, emotive phrase-
ology’ of CIS. If this rhetoric sets or implies an impossible criterion of neutrality for
social accounting as well as delimits its potential content and form, it also reflects a
powerful established institutional discourse that is mostly difficult for counter infor-
mation systems type activity to compete with (Gallhofer and Haslam 1991).
Building upon the above points, a key structural and contextual factor that delim-
its and disturbs the functioning of groups seeking to mobilise social accounting as
counter information systems activity is that they are engaged in a struggle with other
groups to capture social accounting’s possibilities. Furthermore, these other forces
and groups are relatively more powerful than pressure groups and social activists.
Notably, they manifest in the form of powerful business organisations. From the
late 1960s and the 1970s through to today business organisations have expressed an
apparent interest in mobilising social accounting. In the UK bodies such as the
Confederation of British Industry (see CBI 1973) ostensibly encouraged such activity.12
From the 1970s onwards there was especially an increase in reporting to employees
and in employee-orientated themes in business accounting (Maunders 1984,
Hopwood et al. 1994). In the 1980s there was a dramatic increase in business social
accounting focused ostensibly upon the ecological impact of business organisations
124 Is social accounting the soul of justice?
(Gray and Bebbington 2001). Analyses in the literature to date suggest that the
number of interventions reflecting substantially positive identifications with broader
notions of social responsibility, and embracing substantively progressive versions of
social accounting that would challenge the status quo have been small. Inconsistent
with the basic capitalistic tenets of the business system, serious instances have been
the practices of organisations akin to charities, some of these explicitly distancing
themselves from profit-orientation, such as Traidcraft in recent times (see Zadek and
Evans 1993, Gray et al. 1995a: 285–7).13 Moreover, the literature suggests that even
these limited efforts of business to mobilise something akin to an at least mildly pro-
gressive social accounting diminish in the face of policy initiatives to re-inforce con-
ventional behaviour and at times of financial crisis. In this respect the oil crisis and
recession of the late 1970s impacted negatively upon some aspects of social account-
ing’s promotion (Hopwood and Burchell 1980: 14, see also Maunders 1981, 1982a,b,
Gray et al. 1995a, 1996: 93, 116, Mathews 1997: 482). Some of the more positive
interventions, especially in the 1970s, appear to have reflected the pressures upon
business – the threats posed, for instance, by a deteriorating public image of busi-
ness, a shift towards interventionism in respect of legislative or quasi-legislative reg-
ulation and ethical consumerist and ethical investment activity.14 Most business
social accounting disclosure, whether pressurised or not, has constituted, however, a
counter radical social accounting. This is broadly to agree with the weight of sub-
stantiated argument in the literature. Much theorising of social accounting practice
has properly emphasised the tendency of business organisations over recent decades
to hijack social accounting for their own public relations’ purposes and to mobilise it
to counter more progressive social accounting possibilities. In practice and in pro-
posals, social accounting has been watered down by business or problematically
steered. It has been made integral to a public relations exercise of the more dubious
variety: the telling of good news rather than bad news, the countering of bad news,
a practice of the larger company that could most afford it and put it better to their
advantage, and a justification for the functioning of business operations within the
existing or within some other envisaged minimal framework of legislative or quasi-
legislative control. Social accounting practice has exhibited great diversity (see Gray
et al. 1995a) but most theorising of it indicates that across this diversity much of it
has been problematic in the above terms.15 Hopwood (1978: 56) suggests that cor-
porations may have seen social accounting as a means of establishing and reinforcing
their claim to social legitimacy. In doing this, however, businesses have been prob-
lematically manipulative and deceptive doing more to reproduce and enhance rather
than to challenge and counter the problematic socio-political order. Puxty (1986:
99–100) cites Burchell et al. (1985) in suggesting in effect that a counter radical
social accounting has functioned more intensely and effectively than conventional
accounting in this regard (see also Hopwood 1978). Many would agree that, even
while mobilising their social accountings, the substantive opposition of business to
legislative or quasi-legislative interventionism in this area helps to reinforce the
point.16 In this regard, some business managers have explicitly and officially opposed
interventions threatening their discretion. Gallhofer and Haslam (1997) cite a few
illustrative and recent management views in respect of environmental accounting.
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 125
For Buck (1992: 38), of the Institute of Directors, business should aid the environment
but ‘these are matters for the company – not for government legislation’ (cf. Blaza
1992: 34). It seems that business spokespersons have rarely felt they had to justify
their anti-interventionism, albeit occasionally pointing to motivational arguments
and the crudeness and/or costliness of a legislative approach. They have often drawn
from a popular rhetoric as if the case was self-evident, some expressing the view that
management needs to be trusted for results (see Cannon 1994, Gallhofer and Haslam
1997: 155–6). Where discretion has been possible, most businesses have not had
their social accounts attested substantively and independently from business man-
agement and owners (Gray et al. 1995a: 48). Even in the unlikely event that most of
those seeking to protect their discretion do so with appropriate intentions, uncoor-
dinated micro-organisational responses fail to re-assure. The pronouncements do not
constitute an argument against more substantive regulation that would seemingly
give further re-assurance (see Tinker 1985, Hines 1991b, Maunders and Burritt
1991: 23–4, Gallhofer and Haslam, 1993, Semple 1993). It appears that given the
contextual pressures to pursue the conventional financial goals and conform with
hegemonic preferences, there are incentives to avoid engaging in social accounting or
to embrace its more counter radical varieties (see Owen 1992b: 7, see also Bronner
1994: 347). Hall’s (1991) suggestion that strong capitalistic structures have never
willingly reduced business profit materially in the general interest is pertinent here.
Further, for Bronner (1994) the concern to capture disclosures can constitute a strong
motivation for intervention on the part of the relatively powerful in this context:
powerful established forces feel especially threatened by the possibilities of democ-
racy and the potential power of the masses and are quick to see the downside of
openness.
Business interventions, then, have typically reflected instrumentalist concerns to
manage public relations and to secure further control, consistent with a conservatism
or the enhancement of problematic hegemonic forces. In these business strategies, the
wider context has basically been viewed from a narrow, instrumentalist perspective
on what is best for business and in effect from a position aligned to the reproduction
and enhancement of wider structures. Even the more positive interventions have sub-
stantively overlooked problematic structures and forces of the context. Such inter-
ventions have typically been aligned with mildly progressive forces while largely
displacing attention from obstacles to substantive change. The more influential
impact of business interventions in respect of social accounting has reduced to efforts
that, rather than progressively emancipate, seek to deceive, distort, manipulate and
problematically control. In the main, the interventions amount to a cynical mobilis-
ing of both unofficial and official information. And here it should again be noted that
the more official disclosures of business, with their powerful aura, can lend some sup-
port to their unofficial ones (Gallhofer and Haslam 1991). Business managers have
typically led and shaped interventions in respect of social accounting and some pres-
sure has been exerted to preserve or enhance managerial discretion. Even the more
positive interventions are scarcely integral to a more holistic progressive strategy. The
structural forces are such that little more than this can be expected from business
organisations, in the absence of more interventionist regulation. In this regard, the
126 Is social accounting the soul of justice?
billionaire investor, George Soros, in advocating at least a degree of interventionist
regulation in this area, reflects on especially today’s competitive context in com-
menting: ‘If individual companies did it (i.e. disclosed more), they would suffer
a competitive disadvantage against others that don’t do it’ (cited in Denny 2002: 28).
Further, in the interventions of business, principles equating to a concern to prob-
lematise the role of a privileged knower and to embrace a differentiated universalism
that is respectful of diversity have been distorted. Business organisations monitor and
research their stakeholders in terms of their diversity so as to manipulate and control
them rather than give them a voice, in effect reinforcing problematic hegemonic
forces (Owen et al. 2000). On balance, business social accountings on the face of it are
suggestive of an activity to engender more repressive than more emancipatory move-
ment. As public relations’ exercises they can be dangerously seductive and mollify
advocates of potentially more radical emancipatory accounting possibilities in society
in the process.
In more recent times, a number of trends are observable in respect of business
disclosure on the one hand and counter-information systems on the other. The shift
in the socio-political context towards an anti-interventionist neo-classical polity has
meant that social accounting is perceived even less as a threat by the business world
(cf. Bailey et al. 1994, Gray et al. 1995a: 62–3, Monbiot 2001). Business increasingly
has seen social accounting as a public relations opportunity in an age where increased
emphasis has been placed on business image. As global communication in cyberspace
has taken off, social accountings have manifested increasingly on the World Wide
Web. From the 1980s onwards, business has reflected the increasing concerns about
the ecological environment in their social accounting, displacing other social
accounting concerns to some extent (Owen et al. 1997, 2000, Gray 1999: 9). If envi-
ronmental accountings have in some cases intermeshed with wider social concerns –
a tendency that is marked in some forms of sustainability reporting (see Elkington
1998) – such social accounting in practice has continued to be disappointing.
Environmental and sustainability accountings may have become increasingly evident
in practice but critical analysts sum up the way they are seen by using expressions
such as public relations’ ‘greenwash’ to summarise their status (Greer and Bruno
1997, Karliner 1997, Gray and Bebbington 2001).
A number of business organisations today take the public relations’ possibilities of
social including environmental accounting very seriously, spending substantial sums
of money on it. Transnational corporations like Shell and BP have joined the
Co-operative Bank and the Body Shop as major investors in social accounting. The
reports they have produced, often in addition to the legally required annual report,
are significant documents, ostensibly communicating the impact of the company’s
operations on the community and the environment to a range of different stakehold-
ers, evidencing continuities in the latter regard with the stakeholder models pushed
in the 1970s. Indeed, the social reports of transnational companies such as Shell and
BP are similar in terms of their form to bodies such as Traidcraft (Owen et al. 2000:
82). This similarity of form is on the face of it powerful in creating an aura through
which the company is able to hold itself out as socially responsible. The reports
differ, however, from Traidcraft in terms of their orientation. Commentators on and
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 127
critics of this type of social reporting by business have pointed out that these reports
contain little of value to stakeholders. Indeed, the way companies portray themselves
in their social reports amounts to what has again been called a public relations
‘whitewash’ or ‘greenwash’. As in the social accounting manifestations of the late
1960s and early 1970s, the emancipatory potential of social accounting has been dis-
placed whilst social accounting has been mobilised for counter radical and systems
preserving purposes. Although there is more social accounting, with the phenome-
non of the World Wide Web of note in this regard, close critical analysis indicates
that it has come even more evidently to typify the output of the public relations
department (Greer and Bruno 1997, Karliner 1997).
The increased power of transnational business, including relative to many nation
state governments today, and the tightened grip of financial pressure within the
context of a markets orientated globalisation, has in our view enhanced the control
of business over social accounting even further (see Bailey et al. 1994, Monbiot 2001).
If pressure groups and counter-information systems type activists have shifted
more of their focus to a more global level, in part a positioning that has enhanced
challenges to business, business attempts to displace and transform these initiatives
have also been strengthened at the global level. As we have seen, transnational cor-
porations have invested much in social, especially environmental, accounting –
whether as integral to annual reports, in ‘stand alone’ reporting, in websites or in
other media – that has aimed at mollifying social criticism and legitimising business
activities (see Gray and Bebbington 2001: 250). Recognising the potentiality of
more global regulation of the various quasi-legislative or context-pressurised types,
business has sought to stay ahead of the game and sought to soften the impact of such
regulation and minimise any prescription (see Gallhofer and Haslam 1997b).
Interesting case studies here are the involvements of business in recent times in ini-
tiatives to mobilise and give professional or quasi-official status to social accounting
at a global level. Reflecting their power, business interests have been working in co-
operation with a variety of different agencies, most notably the United Nations,
groups concerned with ethical investment, academics and professional accountancy
bodies, in respect of such initiatives. The presence of business in initiatives implicat-
ing social accounting is so pervasive today that – parallel to what Monbiot (2001)
observed to be a corporatisation of the state – one can describe more recent develop-
ments in social accounting as the corporatisation of social accounting. The manifes-
tations of the ISEA and the GRI are here worth exploring.
In part, out of frustration over the disappointing interventions of the established
accountancy professions in respect of social accounting, ISEA was set up ostensibly as
a new and global professional accounting body aiming at the global mobilising of forms
of social accounting that would render business organisations socially and ethically
accountable (ISEA 2002b). Its aim continues to be to function as a body producing
social accounting standards and providing education and training programmes to
develop professionally qualified social accountants. While a global social accounting
profession and practice suggests much potential, there are aspects of ISEA that
severely restrict the realising of this. For instance, the founding membership of
ISEA includes business organisations along with ‘non-profit’ corporate responsibility
128 Is social accounting the soul of justice?
organisations, consultancies, business ethicist groups and business school faculty.
Indeed, the constitution of ISEA’s governing body indicates a significant input from
business (ISEA 2002b,c). It is thus not surprising that the tone of ISEA pronounce-
ments is one of trusting and engaging in experiments or ‘trialing’ with business
organisations (see Zadek et al. 1997: 56). Relatedly, ISEA’s recommendations in
respect of social accounting are much nearer to a mainstream approach than they are
to a radical. Current social structures and institutions are scarcely challenged and cri-
tique of conventional accounting is somewhat sidestepped (see Owen et al. 2000: 82).
Advocacy of a legislative interventionist stance is largely eschewed and substantially
countered, ISEA’s pronouncements arguably evidencing the influence of a business
rhetoric aimed at ‘business friendly regulation’:
Critics suggest that, in seeking to gain acceptance from business, ISEA’s social
accounting fuses with the watered down and problematic versions already found as
‘voluntary’ public relations exercises in practice (Owen et al. 2000). There are many
aspects of ISEA’s interventions that indicate a displacement and appropriation of the
emancipatory and radical possibilities of social accounting. For instance, although
ISEA advocates reporting to a whole range of different stakeholders, it gives consid-
erable power to business management to influence the terms of reference for the
participation of stakeholders. The danger here is that a narrow instrumentalism will
thus shape the engagement with stakeholders. The way in which ISEA elaborates the
aims of stakeholder engagement in its foundation framework Accountability 1000
(AA 1000) is of note in this respect. The executive summary of AA 1000 states that
stakeholder involvement ‘can be at the heart of a virtuous circle of [financial] per-
formance improvement’ (ISEA 1999: 20) Owen et al. (2000: 82, 85) in their insight-
ful critique of what they call the ‘new social audits’ – implicating initiatives such as
ISEA – comment critically in this respect on the ‘managerial slant to the practice of
social auditing’.17 AA 1000’s mobilising of emancipatory concepts parallels the prob-
lematic rhetoric of the empowerment literature in management more generally in
that it appropriates radical terms and renders them consistent with a conventional
and instrumentalist business strategy. The rhetoric here is powerful, downplaying
social conflict and displacing concerns about the operations of capitalistic organisations
and social conflict.
Another recent development illustrating the pervasiveness of the presence of busi-
ness in social accounting interventions today is the GRI, an example of what can be
understood as the recommending of a quasi-official social accounting on a global
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 129
level. Launched in 1997 by the Coalition of Environmentally Responsible Economies
(CERES)18 in co-operation with the United Nations’ Environmental Programme
(UNEP), the GRI implicates social, with emphasis on environmental, accounting.
It explicitly refers to being concerned to ‘elevate sustainability reporting practices
worldwide to a level …[equivalent]… to financial reporting’ (GRI 2002e). It pub-
lished Sustainability Reporting Guidelines in 2000 after these, echoing conventional
accounting standards setting procedure, had gone through an Exposure Draft stage
a year earlier (GRI 2000a). The GRI sought that all organisations adopt a ‘triple
bottom line’ approach to accounting whereby duties to economy, society and the
environment – considered the three facets of sustainability – would all be reflected.19
Organisations were encouraged to use the Guidelines as a framework to demonstrate
conformance with the UN’s Global Compact principles (The Global Compact
2002a,b). The latter principles, proposed in an address by Kofi Annan, the UN
Secretary General, to world business leaders at the World Economic Forum, Davos,
31 January 1999, were aimed at involving business in a compact with society and the
environment. In his address, the Secretary General suggested to business leaders that
they should ‘help build the social and environmental pillars required to sustain the new
global economy and make globalisation work for all the world’s people’. The Global
Compact was aimed at disseminating ‘good practice based on universal principles’ and
focusing upon human rights, labour and the environment (The Gobal Compact
2002a,b). The GRI Guidelines, which seek to impact in part through the Chief
Executive Officer’s Report or its equivalent, promote reporting on employee welfare
and also require statements in respect of profile, vision, strategy, policies and organ-
isation and management systems (GRI 2000a). The universality of the Guidelines,
aside from plans to develop approaches to meet the specific needs of smaller organi-
sations and industry-specific supplements, is explicitly emphasised. On the face of it,
GRI is suggestive of a progressive development of enormous potential. In our world
today, the idea of a global social accounting is a very positive one. Radical movements
are increasingly recognising a need for democratic and socialistic world governance
(Monbiot 2002). A global social accounting goes hand in hand with such a vision. It
can potentially play its part in radical and emancipatory projects on a global scale.
The possibilities for a global social accounting are also enhanced today given the
technological advancements facilitating co-operation and communication on a global
level (Gallhofer and Haslam 1997b). Membership of GRI’s Charter Group, which has
provided strategic, financial and operational support to GRI, since its inauguration
as a permanent, global and independent institution in April 2002 (GRI 2002c),
includes representatives from pressure groups such as Amnesty International,
Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam and Human Rights Watch, the World Bank
group, The Association of Certified Chartered Accountants, accountancy firms such
as KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers and transnational corporations such as General
Motors, Ford, Nike and Shell (GRI 2002f ). The GRI has also been able to attract
significant financial backing not only from the UN and the US Environmental
Protection Agency but also from several business-funded bodies (GRI 2002d). Given
the strong representation and influence of business it is thus not surprising that
much of what GRI proposes parallels that of ISEA in terms of its radicality. Proposals
130 Is social accounting the soul of justice?
reflect at best mildly progressive initiatives of business organisations in the social
accounting arena and facilitate more public relations whitewash. The substantive
involvement of big business in social accounting interventions, in the context
indeed of UN initiatives to address problems that business has helped to engender and
build up, does much to displace and contradict their emancipatory potential and adds
to claims about the captured status of the UN (Owen et al. 2000, Monbiot 2001).
Initiatives such as ISEA and GRI, in summary, have significant potential to
displace more radical social accounting initiatives. They exhibit a limited vision
and substantively end up aligning social accounting with hegemonic forces, thus
promoting a form of counter radical social accounting. Owen et al. (2000: 82) point
here to the danger of social accounting manifestations such as ISEA displacing the
‘democratic ideals of the founding fathers of the [social audit] movement’. Further,
global accounting initiatives implicating business today have strong imperialistic
tendencies in reflecting a problematic rather than legitimate world governance. In
this respect, these initiatives are continuous with previous imperialistic mobilisings
of accounting (see, e.g. Gallhofer et al. 1999, 2000a, Annisette 2000, Davie 2000,
Gibson 2000, Greer and Patel 2000, Jacobs 2000, Neu 2000). They have promoted
a social accounting exhibiting a strong universalistic stance that displaces difference
in terms of cultural values and privileges Western ways of doing instead. Aside
from repressing valued particularism, such a stance displaces possibilities for the
West – and for the global or universal – to learn from particular ‘other’ cultures. In
this regard, Gallhofer et al. (1999, 2000a) point, in relation to accounting, to the
emancipatory possibilities of learning about the philosophy and culture of indigenous
peoples. Culturally, globalisation is suggestive of a problematic Western universalism
that threatens to swamp local valued particularism (Held and McGrew 2000).
In the light of the corporatisation of social accounting, counter information
systems activists today face a challenging struggle. Yet, aided by the possibilities of
global and electronic communications technology, a number of activist groups (e.g.
Corporate Watch, CorpWatch, Schnews and Indymedia) continue to try to mobilise
a social accounting that is much more recognisable as a radically orientated account-
ing with critical emancipatory intent. Such activities more especially indicate that
the capture of social accounting by business, if stronger today than earlier, is not
complete. Indicative interventions constituting counter information systems activity
today are those of the activist group Corporate Watch. Oxford-based Corporate
Watch describes itself as a ‘radical research and publishing group’ (Corporate Watch
2002a). Set up initially in late 1996 by anti-roads activists who were interested in
gaining insights into the construction and road building industry, Corporate Watch
soon embraced a more global orientation by including the exposure of transnational
corporations in their range of activities. The aim of the group is ‘to support grass-
roots and direct activism against large corporations, particularly multinationals’
(Corporate Watch 2002a). The group is a workers’ co-operative and receives the
majority of its funds from charitable foundations and radical trusts – examples
include Greenpeace and London Reclaim the Streets – for its contract research. The
group’s activities are, however, not restricted to the stated interests of such organisa-
tions. The group explicitly stresses its aim to be independent from those who provide
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 131
funding and in this regard carries out work beyond specific funded contracts
(Corporate Watch 2002a). Echoing CIS, Corporate Watch also provides detailed
‘counter’ reports on companies which are available on the their website. These reports –
for example focusing on Shell and some of the large supermarket chains – reflect the
expertise of the group in the food, agricultural and oil industry. In addition to these
reports the group also publishes a bi-monthly newsletter which is ‘jam-packed with
news of anti-corporate activism from around the world, and cutting-edge research
into corporate misdeeds and cover-ups’ (Corporate Watch 2002a). The radical orien-
tation of Corporate Watch is indicated in their description of the approach they take
in their analyses:
Our approach is to investigate, corporate structures and the system that supports
them more broadly, rather than solely criticising the individual companies for
bad behaviour. We are committed to ending the ecological and social destruction
wrought by the corporate profit motive.
(Corporate Watch 2002a)
Again this echoes CIS, including in terms of its focus on the repressive character
of capitalistic structures and institutions. Corporate Watch, however, reflecting the
shift in the context, embrace the global electronic communications technology. And
they form alliances with various activist groups and grassroots movements to reflect
a more global orientation and a more remarked recognition of a multiplicity of
potential change agents shaped by a multiplicity of experiences (see, e.g. Corporate
Watch 2002b). These latter reflections and recogntitions refine and enhancce
Corporate Watch’s version of a radical social accounting in today’s ‘globalisataion’
context.
Our summarised review has here offered some comparison and contrast of counter-
information systems type mobilisings of social accounting and business interventions
in respect of social accounting and pointed to continuities and discontinuities in both
kinds of activity. Both of these interventions are suggestive of progressive as well as
regressive dimensions. They manifest in the same context and share things in
common. Their orientations and intentions, however, suggest different, indeed con-
flicting and opposing, emphases. If both interventions can be located on the same
continuum in terms of orientation to the current socio-political order, the characters
of their activities locate them towards differing extremes of this continuum. The rad-
ical activist groups attempt to mobilise social accounting in order to destabilise cur-
rent repressive structures and engender emancipatory change. Business attempts
substantively to displace this emancipatory potential of social accounting through
a counter radical social accounting that is geared to the protection or enhancement of
a repressive socio-political order. If social accounting can be mobilised by hegemonic
as well as counter hegemonic forces it cannot, it seems, be fully captured by either.
Nevertheless, it is heavily shaped by the relatively powerful hegemonic forces. The
efforts of counter hegemonic groups to mobilise social accounting in this respect
constitute an especially challenging project of struggle in today’s context.
132 Is social accounting the soul of justice?
On the interventions of government and the established
accountancy profession in respect of social accounting:
further insights into the ambiguity of social accounting
in action
Including in the guise of business and business dynamics, hegemonic forces are con-
fronted in effect with issues of governance, including the problems of how to main-
tain and how to enhance legitimacy. On the face of it, a counter radical social
accounting helps hegemonic forces to deal with such issues, including mollifying
and transforming the problem of legitimacy. On the one hand, in part through their
counter radical social accountings, relatively wealthy and powerful business owners
and managers in effect convey the message that not only do they care about things
beyond the narrow financial economistic instrumentalism that is their conventional
scope but that they are also even benevolent in their actions in respect of such matters.
On the other, in the context of each individual business, or in some sub-group of busi-
nesses (such as all the businesses located in a particular nation state), these owners and
managers, also in part through their accountings, emphasise at the same time the pres-
sures upon them to succumb to such an instrumentalism, pressures which they portray
as emanating from a system that they in effect naturalise, take-for-granted and de-
politicise, depicting it as ‘economic’ rather than ‘socio-political’ and even seeing it as
something like the best of all possible worlds. Dynamic contextual factors, such as
changing pressures upon business, render the capacity of business to deal with such
issues mutable, but we have indicated the strength of business in dealing with these
issues over a relatively long period. In the guise of government, hegemonic forces also
face related issues, including problems of legitimacy. The precise character of these
issues and how challenging they are for government are matters that also in princi-
ple are mutable, influenced by broader contextual dynamics. Given an acknowledg-
ment on the part of people of the power of transnational business in a context of
globalisation, an appreciation in part fostered by the media, many nation state gov-
ernments claim a sort of legitimacy – if it is one that ironically highlights their weak-
nesses and encourages apathy in respect of formal democratic practices of the national
system – by reference to this global context, as it can provide excuses for actions or
inactions that otherwise could be regarded as unethical and irresponsible. If in an ear-
lier context such excuses were less easily made, nation state governments arguably
faced, in at least this respect, a more intense legitimacy crisis. If seen as a relatively
powerful player, a nation state government could hardly blame a systemic context it
was meant to be responsible for and in control of. In the guise of the established
accountancy profession, there are also governance issues, including again issues of
legitimacy. Some of these issues will resemble or fuse with those of governments: the
profession can, in some respects, where it is not already a state body, be seen as a ‘pri-
vatised’ branch of government that, as a profession, legitimises its activities by refer-
ence to the government-like explicit claim to serve the public interest. Other issues
will resemble or fuse with those of business. The profession has been seen as a sort of
club representing the interests of the profit-making accountancy firms, including the
larger transnational ones. The accountancy profession can itself be seen as helping
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 133
make up a business system that is substantively at the service of hegemonic forces (see
Willmott 1990, Sikka et al. 1991, 1995, 1999, Cousins and Sikka 1993, Willmott
et al. 1993, Sikka 1994, 2000, Sikka and Willmott 1995, 1997, Dunn and Sikka
1999). There are particular complexities and intricacies here. For example, in some
contexts it has arguably been perceived to be in the interests of established forces for
the accountancy profession to be seen as ‘private’ or ‘independent’. This creates very
particular governance, including legitimacy issues. For instance, the profession has in
this context to be concerned about legitimising the regulatory framework or space
within which it functions and it has to be concerned to legitimise involvement of its
members in particular activities in the face of competing alternatives. There are legit-
imacy problems vis-à-vis particular as well as general interests. Again, these gover-
nance issues are mutable in the contextual dynamics of their location. For example,
to the extent that government is relatively powerful vis-à-vis corporations and the
international market orientated system, one would expect to see a correspondence
between government and professional interventions that is substantively fashioned by
government. To the extent that the government is relatively weak in this regard, or
captured by a business oriented policy, one would expect both the government and
the profession in accounting interventions to be pursuing parallel paths strongly
influenced by business.
So, what of mobilisations of social accounting by government and the established
accountancy profession in the UK? Over several decades there have been calls for
legislative and/or quasi-legislative interventions. One recent call was reported in
The Guardian on 13 June 2002:
According to The Corporate Report, it was this ‘custodial role … in the community’
that gave rise to the responsibility to ‘report publicly’ and to satisfy ‘public account-
ability’ (ASSC 1975, 1.3). The discussion paper therefore highlighted obligations
to a variety of stakeholders, beyond if including the shareholders, of a financial
and non-financial nature. All organisations, including the business organisation that
constituted the report’s main focus, were to be accountable to the public and were to
properly satisfy reasonable demands for or ‘rights to’ information in respect of the
organisation (ASSC 1975: 17, 1.8). Aside from equity-investors, loan creditors and
business contacts, the report delineated employees, local/national governments and
a catch-all group actually termed ‘the public’ (explicitly including taxpayers, rate
payers, consumers and community or special interest groups such as environmental
protection groups, regional pressure groups and political parties) as stakeholders in
the business organisation having a reasonable ‘right’ to information (ASSC 1975: 17,
1.9). Thus even pressure groups on the face of it were to be catered for. Further, there
was an explicit commitment to making accounting more comprehensive to these
envisaged users. New statements promoted included statements of future prospects
(covering employment levels), corporate objectives and value-added, and an employ-
ment report (ASSC 1975: 48, 6.5).21 A broadening of the auditor’s role and of what
the phrase true and fair view was to connote were promised. With the call for more
research into social accounting, the paper gave a stimulus to accountings that would
measure and report upon stakeholder, for instance employee, satisfaction (Renshall
1976, Hopwood et al. 1994). Later, The Corporate Report’s commitments would come
to look more astonishing as the profession’s interest in social accounting waned.
The proposals made in The Corporate Report point to an accounting with the poten-
tial to increase visibility of aspects of the operation of a business organisation that
would help stakeholders other than the owners of the business to assess its impact on
their own lives and well-being in particular and its impact upon the community
more generally. An especially significant departure in The Corporate Report was the
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 137
attention ostensibly given, consistent with government policy, to accounting for
employees, if it also reflected as well as helped stimulate an already expanding
employee reporting practice (supra, see also Hussey 1978, 1979, Purdy 1981). This
attention to employees was emphasised in the paper’s frank acknowledgment of ‘the
way in which employees are almost totally ignored in the present Companies Act and
in corporate reports’ (ASSC 1975: 51, 6.12). The discussion paper maintained that
employers had a duty to report to and about employees who were deemed materially
dependent on the business. Employees and unions were to be provided with infor-
mation that would facilitate ‘assessing the security and prospects of employment
and … collective bargaining’ (ASSC 1975: 21, 2.16). Matters deemed of interest to
actual and prospective employees were the ability of the employers to meet wage
demands, the financial viability of the bargaining units and other parts of the firm as
well as of the whole of the firm, the pay and conditions of employees by group,
prospects regarding employment levels, locations and conditions, and employees’
divisional contributions (ASSC 1975: 21–2, 2.17). The employment report advo-
cated in the discussion paper was to inform about a number of matters of interest to
employees and those concerned about employees, including the size and dynamics of
the workforce, the age and gender distribution of the workforce, employees’ functions
and locations, major closures, disposals and acquisitions made, working hours, fringe
benefits, pensions, names of unions representing workforce and membership details,
health and safety and some employment ratios (Gray et al. 1996: 196). Such disclosures
promised to create or re-inforce awareness of matters of social concern, consistent
with the promotion of a social accounting with a progressive intent.
Of the new statements of reporting advocated in The Corporate Report, the value
added statement is of particular interest here as it was also specifically promoted in
government policy in the broad area of industrial relations (subter). Value-added
accounting ostensibly reflected a stakeholder and especially employee orientation by
embracing and fostering a new way of seeing the relationship between the company
and its stakeholders, including its employees. For Morley (1978), this way of seeing
reflected the dynamics of the social context of the time, in which corporatist think-
ing was still very influential: government, employees and shareholders and other fin-
anciers were portrayed as partners in the business, sharing in the distribution of the
new ‘value added’ bottom line.22 Employee remuneration was thus, significantly, not
depicted as a cost, as in what had become the conventional profit and loss account,
but as a distribution of the value added to a partner stakeholder (ASSC 1975: 49–50,
6.7–6.11). For Binder et al. (1978), the advocacy of value added was consistent with
an open management style that would ‘ “open the books” and welcome the increased
questioning … and promote a more participative and less autocratic way of getting
results’. The TUC (1974) were convinced enough by value added to suggest its
appropriateness as a performance indicator in disclosure to employees. And they
demanded further openness to facilitate the system’s acceptance where it was to be
linked to remuneration. That the profession, as well as the government (subter) saw
value added and related disclosure as facilitating industrial democracy suggested
greater employee interaction with accounting (Robson 1994: 50), indicating more
radical possibilities in terms of employee usage of accounting (Hopwood et al.
138 Is social accounting the soul of justice?
1994: 219, 221). In this respect, commentators point to how value added accounting
may make more visible the social character of production and in some contexts help
raise issues about the justice of distributions made (Stolliday and Attwood 1978,
Gray and Maunders 1980, Hopwood et al. 1994: 214–5). For Gray et al. (1987: 51),
‘showing the comparative share received by each stakeholder group may …[high-
light]… the antagonistic nature of such relationships, as an increased share for one
group is associated with a corresponding reduction for others’. Ammunition of sorts
was here supplied to radical groups. And value-added accounting potentially could
become more explicitly contested and a focus of struggle in recognition that some
value addeds might favour counter-hegemonic forces more than others. The social
accounting of The Corporate Report thus had the potential to be mobilised in more rad-
ical interventions and to thus be conflict-enhancing rather than conflict-resolving for
problematic hegemonic forces (cf. Hopwood et al., 1994). The public criticism of the
recommendations in The Corporate Report, notably from business and often expressed
in a blunt and forceful rhetoric, in part can be taken as indicating aspects of The Corporate
Report’s radical possibilities. For a spokesperson for The Guardian Exchange Group:
The Corporate Report does nothing to increase profits but will impose further
statistical demands on industry: the details in these statistics will be used to
further sectional interests within the community and I fear in some cases the
use would be mischievous. It is essential therefore that corporate reporting
should be confined to those who have – in the case of companies – provided the
capital …
(Comments on The Corporate Report on public record at the ICAEW library)
The Young Chartered Accountants Group noted that some of its members saw the
discussion paper as ‘socialist clap trap’ and suggested that it appeared to be a ‘sop to
the current socialist climate’, indicating that some perceived the social accounting
proposals as potentially radical in character and challenging to the status quo
(Comments on The Corporate Report on public record at the ICAEW library). Similarly,
the suggestion in The Corporate Report that employees had a ‘right’ to information
was considered by commentators as a threat (see comments on The Corporate Report
of The Law Society’s Standing Committee on Company Law and the Management
Sub-Committee of the Manchester Technical Advisory Committee, Comments on
The Corporate Report on public record at the ICAEW library). The perceptions of
some of the commentators thus point to the emancipatory potential of The Corporate
Report: its social accounting had the potential to help radically construct ways of see-
ing the injustices of the operations of business and capitalistic economy and society.
If the intentions of government and the profession in the 1970s had apparently
progressive dimensions, was there also a downside? A number of regressive dimen-
sions can be suggested. One point it is worth making here is that the interventions
displaced more radical possibilities. It is of interest that the profession itself, if it
suggested it ‘tempting to propose that entities disclose information which will show
their impact on, and their endeavours to protect society, its amenities and environment’
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 139
(ASSC 1975: 57, 6.45), declared many social accounting possibilities impractical due
to a lack of generally agreed ‘measurement’ techniques and simply called for further
research. Relatedly, The Corporate Report’s tendency to continue to promote conven-
tional and technocratic accounting practice threatened to seriously oversimplify the
task of disclosing on the business organisation in more socially holistic terms. The
discussion paper’s proposals also amounted to a narrowing down or displacement of
radical social accounting possibilities and an overly close alignment to conventional
accounting in terms of perceived role, content, form and aura. The emphasis in
The Corporate Report was upon a financial economistic accounting, albeit through a more
expansive stakeholder perspective. The working party’s terms of reference, for instance,
stipulated that it ‘seek to establish a set of working concepts as a basis for financial
reporting’ and consider ‘the most suitable means of measuring and reporting the eco-
nomic position, performance and prospect of undertakings for the purposes and per-
sons identified …’ (ASSC: 1). The Corporate Report ironically displaced attention from
the need to critically evaluate conventional accounting. The latter was granted too
prominent a status in the discourse, with alternatives seen as very supplementary to
this core practice. Conventional accounting was interpreted as in many ways basically
a mature and sound practice that just needed adding to a little in spite of the hints
in the discussion paper that it was narrow and instrumental, even reflective of a sys-
tem giving too much weight to the assumed narrow financial economistic interests
of capitalistic owners and the interests of the socio-political order in an economic
materialism in general. Too much of the proposal, irrespective of whether it is seen
as an expert technology of procedural rationality, is captured by the conventional.
It thus displaces broader questions and depoliticises controversy. Attention is displaced
from injustices of the wider socio-political context (see Tinker 1980, 1985, Power
1991: 30–1). Hopwood and Burchell (1980: 14), reflecting on the seventies, thus see
the push for broader disclosure orientated mainly to employees as giving ‘rise to an
expansion of the scope of traditional accounting rather than the provision of alterna-
tive means of assessment’. The Corporate Report is largely consistent with this analy-
sis. The emancipatory potential of the accounting under construction was
constrained and displaced. Some protagonists in debate over The Corporate Report even
promoted the view that ‘social accounting’ was outside of the realm of conventional
accountancy, a deliberate restriction on the scope of accounting. The Leinster Society
of Chartered Accountants of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland put it
as follows: ‘The majority of members seem to accept at a personal level that public
accountability and social audits are acceptable and desirable values. There was, how-
ever, a reluctance to accept that the accountancy profession as such should be a leader
in the development of these values’ (Comments on The Corporate Report on public
record at the ICAEW library).
A problematic of The Corporate Report that served to enhance the above regressive
dimension was that it was overly influenced by a professional-expert rhetoric
and imagery. While there are positive dimensions to social accounting’s assuming
a professional-expert status (see Hines 1988, Gray 1990a,b, see also Gorz 1989),
there are also a range of negative dimensions, as has been suggested in the
literature (see Power and Laughlin 1992, Gallhofer and Haslam 1997b). These
140 Is social accounting the soul of justice?
negative dimensions pertain to a weakening of social accounting’s emancipatory
potential by rendering it more easily captured by problematic hegemonic forces.
A professional-expert practice, in its search for rules and regulations, can problemat-
ically oversimplify (see Hines 1988, Gorz 1989, Gray 1990a,b, Power 1991). Once
established it can come to be difficult to change (see Gray and Laughlin 1991, Gray
1992, Power 1992). It can accrue an aura that helps place it beyond a critical ques-
tioning and people may in any case come to trust it and see it as fulfilling a noble
social role. They may come to see it as professional, neutral and beyond politics, an
institution recognised and valued by the state, the law and their affiliates and as
something that might substantively be taken-for-granted. While an accounting may
be close to the people in terms of its pervasiveness and the significance of its impact,
it can thus come, in spite of its claim to serve the people, to be overly distant from
them (Gallhofer and Haslam 1991). Power (1991) in this context expresses concern
about the potential extension of the power of accountants through the capture of
social accounting. He fears the extension of existing modes of accounting regulation
that he takes to give too much influence to ‘self-appointed experts such as account-
ants’ (cf. Perks and Gray 1979, 1980). Further, in this regard, The Corporate Report
reflected the tendency discernible in many professional accountancy interventions in
respect of social accounting to elaborate a professional-expert accounting technology
prior to even arriving at any firm consensus over social accounting’s purpose. This is
even if such an elaboration can be very problematic, for instance, in unduly influenc-
ing the very construction of relations of accountability (see Puxty 1986, 1991, Power
1991). The professional-expert stance thus threatens to be one of the overly confident
‘privileged knower’. Indeed, the initiatives of the profession as well as the govern-
ment that mobilised social accounting appear to have reflected fairly minimal con-
cern to consult with different social groups and rather assumed a privileged authority
status, although the working party on The Corporate Report did get involved in some
broad consultation as in their survey of directors. The Corporate Report very much pro-
moted existing professional practice and the profession’s preferred ‘self-regulatory’
modus operandi where it maintained that ‘the responsibility to report publicly … is
separate from and broader than the legal obligation to report’ (ASSC 1975: 15, 1.3).
Several commentaries on The Corporate Report also promoted a social accounting
strongly integrated with existing professional practice and the existing self-regulatory
framework. The Association of University Lecturers in Accounting saw a case for
extending ‘the deliberations of the ASC’ (the Accounting Standards Steering Committee
having become the Accounting Standards Committee) to the area of social accounting.
The East Anglian Society of Chartered Accountants’ Technical Advisory Committee
called for a code of Fundamental Social Concepts to parallel Fundamental Accounting
Concepts (Comments on The Corporate Report on public record at the ICAEW library).
Such ideas are not without merit but they do risk the overly confident expansion of
professional accountancy expertise into a broader domain.
A further problematic dimension of the mobilising of social accounting by the
accountancy profession can be located in the government policy initiative it helps
reinforce. The social accounting of The Corporate Report, from the broad stakeholder
approach to the mobilising specifically of the value added statement – with the
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 141
profession, indeed, emphasising the latter by including it on its accounting standards’
agenda – broadly fused with the government’s own promotion of social accounting
and the associated policy initiative. Thus, the accountancy profession’s intervention
fused with a concern to discipline labour and manage industrial relations in the
context of a subtle corporatist control strategy. In the 1970s, corporatist governance
encouraged the view, especially under Labour from 1974 (Robson 1994: 53), that
increased co-operation between workers and management, a system of disclosure ori-
entated to employees and the linking of wages to productivity could work together
as elements in a strategic policy of disciplinary control and control of inflation
(cf. Robson 1994: 50).23 The accountancy profession was ostensibly supportive of
employee orientated accounting in a number of initiatives and the rhetoric of
promoting harmony between the stakeholders, notably between employees and
managers, was evident in The Corporate Report (Renshall 1976, Hopwood et al. 1994:
217–18). The social accounting type disclosure bolstered in the working paper, with
its employee and stakeholder emphasis, blended with the thrust of government
policy. At least, the ambiguities and possibilities of the social accounting promoted
in The Corporate Report facilitated its mobilisation in ways consistent with this policy.
Hopwood et al.’s (1994) study of value added, focusing upon its mobilisation in
a number of arenas in the 1970s, including in that of the accountancy profession’s
regulatory project, here contains much detail and suggests a number of insights
(Burchell et al. 1985).24 In portraying the employees as a partner in the creation and
sharing of the value added, value added accounting came to be understood to pro-
mote harmony and goal congruence. Value added was an ambiguous term that could
‘stand in’ for profit, thus usefully switching emphasis from a concept that was under-
stood to involve conflictual relations. The value-added statement did little to ques-
tion the conventional business goal and scarcely highlighted issues in respect of the
fairness of the wage. If we have noted its radical potential, it is much more obviously
a device for making visible how much profit is reduced by wages and how ‘little the
shareholder receives’: it is much more evidently part of a wage restraint strategy (see
Vickers da Costa, cited in Burchell et al. 1985). As Puxty (1986: 100–1) points out,
most value-added statements made use of a classification scheme that suggested the
understatement of distributions to shareholders (see also Hird 1978, cf. Burchell
et al. 1981).25 If the TUC endorsed value added, we should stress that employers very
much advocated it too. The government was concerned to promote value added as
a way of enhancing wage restraint through linking wages to productivity. It saw dis-
closure as securing greater harmony in industrial relations and facilitating industrial
democracy. This in turn would help achieve the goal of a disciplined and efficient
workforce. The ambiguities of value-added accounting – and, we would suggest,
social accounting more generally – facilitated its functioning here as a subtle force of
control that helped capture a variety of agents in a web reflecting and reinforcing
social relations (Hopwood et al. 1994). The government – with support from other
quarters, including from academia – was in this regard also concerned to give busi-
ness flexibility in its operationalising of value added accounting. The suggestion is
that both the government and the profession here were engaged in a problematic
hegemonic practice. And in this context the desire of the profession to remain
142 Is social accounting the soul of justice?
influential and prosperous aligned it, beyond any claim made to neutrality, to
hegemonic forces (see Cooper 1992, Power and Laughlin 1992).
Consistent with the above argumentation pointing to a problematic aspect of the
mobilising of social accounting by both the government and the accountancy profes-
sion, neither business nor government appear to have been especially committed to
social accounting’s potential as a system of informing that renders accountable and
responsible. The proposals of both very much failed to reflect recognition of any con-
flicting interests of stakeholder groups. They were at best only mildly progressive
and we have seen that they were bound up in a more problematically interested pol-
icy. The point is underscored in that in the context of the ‘great moving right show’,
neither government nor the accountancy profession have shown a great deal of inter-
est in prescribing social accounting. From the late 1970s, discourse over social
accounting severely reduced in state and professional arenas. Hopwood et al. (1994:
229–31) elaborate in this regard how specifically interest in value added accounting
waned from the early 1980s. Constructing a positive relation between democracy and
efficiency was no longer seen as very relevant in a context where industrial relations
were being managed differently. Value added also moved from the agenda of the
accountancy profession’s standards’ setters. The social accounting that emerged to func-
tion on behalf of hegemonic forces in the changing context became less employee-
orientated and less reflective of corporatist governance. The profession’s support of
the more radical ideas in The Corporate Report, including the call for the development
of non-financial performance indicators, has been very disappointing since the mid-
1970s and has largely regressed (see Hopwood et al. 1994, Gray et al. 1996). It is also
striking that most of the government proposals as well as The Corporate Report were
never formally implemented. Hopwood (1985: 362) indicates that The Corporate
Report was never approved by the profession’s leadership.
Another insight helps to problematise the accountancy profession’s mobilising of
The Corporate Report. It seems that a major factor motivating the profession’s inter-
vention was not so much a strong identification with a social accounting project, but
a concern to protect its own influential status in the prescriptive and regulatory
framework of accounting. The profession was very concerned about the possibility of
increased government involvement in its affairs – there was, in the context, relatively
weighty debate about even the nationalisation of accountancy. Relatedly, the profes-
sion was concerned about the threat of being displaced by others in relation to its own
inter-professional struggles.26 The profession appears in the context to have been
worried about being sidelined too often by the government. For instance, when the
previous Conservative administration had set up the Sandilands committee in the
early 1970s, to advance reform in the context of inflation, this had been done over
the heads of the accountancy profession, which was even working on its own ideas
(see Robson 1994: 45). Further, Labour’s opposition Green Paper of January 1974,
The Community and the Company, proposed a setting up of a Companies Commission
that threatened substantial government intervention in accountancy (Whittington
1993, Hopwood et al. 1994: 217–18). The implication is that the accountancy pro-
fession was scarcely committed to anything like a substantively radical social
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 143
accounting. In pursuing its own interests it rather embraced the principles of
a counter radical social accounting.
In summary, it seems that the interventions by the government and the accountancy
profession reviewed here indicated emancipatory possibilities that were, however,
largely displaced and transformed. The interventions on the face of it equated to an
effort to mobilise an at least mildly progressive social accounting. Indeed, we suggest
that the developments in the 1970s, in which both government and the profession
were pressurised and in which a social democratic polity was influential, did help
to positively advance and encourage an accounting that was a step forward.
Nevertheless, the initiatives were also governed by forces that tended to mobilise
these social accountings towards the counter radical typification. The correspondence
to the interests of business helps to reinforce this point. The visions of those involved
in the interventions, their appreciations of the context and the general strategies they
pursued were consistent with an instrumentalism supportive of hegemonic forces.
For Cooper:
Cooper (1992: 36) goes on to suggest that mobilising ‘green’ accounting in the
current context would ‘make matters worse’.29 Thus at least rhetorical elements in
Puxty (1986) and Cooper (1992) appear to challenge and indeed to dismiss social
accounting in general and with this to displace and suppress the idea of a radical
social accounting. Such a reading of Puxty (1986) and Cooper (1992) is at least in
effect embraced in that rhetorical dimension of the mainstream discourse that con-
stitutes a suppression of radical social accounting. Owen et al. (1997: 183) can even
accuse critical accounting of restricting their ‘activities to critique rather than actively
seeking to reform practice … [to] pose a minimalist threat to current orthodoxy’.30
Recent developments in social theorising threaten to impact upon the academic
discourse of social accounting and social accounting regulation and thus upon prac-
tice in such a way as to weaken social accounting’s potential vis-à-vis projects of
emancipation. Postmodern theorising has especially stressed the uncertainties of the
contemporary context, problematising and restraining a policy discourse that would
intervene for substantive change. The danger here is that too much respect is in effect
given to the status quo. Žižek (2000a,b) worries about a tendency in radical as well
as neo-liberal stances to argue against substantive interventionism, the latter all too
often being deemed to lead to something worse – such as ‘authoritarianism’ and
‘totalitarianism’ (see Žižek 2001). Bronner (1994: 325) conveys a similar message to
Žižek when he suggests that not intervening is abdicating responsibility to others,
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 147
who surely will intervene and not necessarily democratically or benevolently: ‘refusing
to make a practical judgment in the name of resisting the “domination” supposedly
implicit in such a choice, is merely an abdication of responsibility’. If one can make
out the case for a substantive interventionism mobilising a radical social accounting
as idea and practice in critical theoretical terms (Gallhofer and Haslam 1997b), this
case is not seen as an especially strong one by many of today’s more mainstream and
more radical theorists. Both mainstream and critical discourses of social accounting,
influenced by recent theoretical developments, have been expressing increased cau-
tion about social accounting interventions (Power 1991, 1992, cf. Gray et al. 1987,
Harte and Owen 1987, Maunders and Burritt 1991, Gray 1992). Power (1992: 489)
cites Dobson (1990) in articulating Gorz’s (1989) position vis-à-vis developments in
environmental policy discourse that emphasise the uncertainty, or even the ignorance,
of our situation, developments that are taken to conceivably impact upon environ-
mental accounting: ‘The … impossibility of knowing enough is crucial to the Green
suggestion that we adopt a hands-off approach to the environment’. Can we ever
know enough? This is problematic.
In that discourse explicitly identifying a notion of mainstream social accounting
(e.g. Gray 1999: 6), this notion is constituted as a problematically narrow and weak-
ened version of social accounting. To the extent that this mainstream social account-
ing is prominent and displaces possibilities, the emancipatory potential of social
accounting is again delimited. We can illustrate this problematic dimension of the
academic discourse of social accounting with reference to some academic texts.
Mathews articulates his version of the mainstream middle ground as follows:
Giving themselves more scope, but similarly, Gray et al. (1988: 8) ambiguously
hold that most writings on corporate social reporting are of ‘the “middle ground” in
which the status quo is accepted (although variously interpreted) and explicit, and
overt ambition is neither to destroy capitalism nor to refine, deregulate and/or liber-
ate it … It is on this “middle ground” that we wish to concentrate’. Mathews (1993: 6)
is here explicitly concerned to delimit social accounting and to distance it from
a notion of radically changing society. Gray et al.’s (1988: 8) reflections on a middle
ground position to which they are aligned similarly does not threaten to stray far
beyond envisioning a social accounting that would fuse with the restraining forces of
the socio-political order. The mainstream social accounting constructed and defended
in the discourse has accrued at best a mildly progressive character (see Gray et al.
1987, 1988, 1996). The liberalism, pragmatism and middle of the road positioning
of the mainstream has constituted the subject matter of critique for more radical
148 Is social accounting the soul of justice?
writers. For Tinker et al. (1991), a ‘middle of the road’ positioning is problematically
unprincipled: ‘the middle ground is a contested terrain that shifts over time with
social struggles and conflicts’. In the context of the debate the embracing of liberal
democracy is suggestive of an acceptance of much of the status quo and a concern at
best to bring about relatively moderate improvement rather than aspiring to more
radical change, threatening to reduce to a kind of cosmetic surgery (see Žižek
2000a,b). Tinker et al. (1991: 28) emphasise the mainstream’s commitment to
a broadly capitalist and problematic polity implied in their liberal democratic frame-
work, its failure to take sides in social conflict and its overlooking of much of the
oppression and exploitation associated with the unequal wealth and power distribu-
tions in society. For Tinker et al. (1991), the pluralism inherent in liberal thinking
counters any possibility of radical systemic change. A problem for the mainstream in
responding to the critique is that one can seek to bring about radical change, includ-
ing through radical social accountings, gradually and pragmatically. Albeit that in
very recent times alliances are being constituted at a general level between
mainstream and radical actors,31 it is still the case that the restraints upon social
accounting in some branches of the mainstream discourse constitute a narrowing of
the phenomenon that distances it from a radical social accounting and weakens its
emancipatory possibilities. As the mainstream form of social accounting is the promi-
nent notion shaping discourse and practice, this is a significant negative dimension of
the academic discourse of social accounting (see Lehman and Tinker 1997).
Another factor threatening to suppress social accounting’s emancipatory potential
relates to how social accounting has been delineated from conventional accounting.
Mainstream social accounting has sometimes been portrayed as something like
a ‘side-dish’ to conventional accounting’s substantial fare. Albeit that the mainstream
discourse is critical of conventional accounting in various ways, implicitly and explic-
itly, it has delimited critique of conventional accounting as well as delimited social
accounting’s possibilities in conveying the impression that financial economistic
matters are irrelevant or adequately dealt with through conventional accounting.
Gray et al. (1987: ix) are consistent with the majority view when they state that
‘corporate social reporting’ involves extending accountability ‘beyond the traditional
role’. The category ‘economic’, however, appears often to be in effect dropped from
social accounting’s scope in this and similar delineations. Yet one can properly
indicate through accounting publicity a concern, for instance, about productive
efficiency, the ethics of the very practice of profit-making, the extent of monopolistic
or oligopolistic power exercised, the distribution of wealth and the reproducing of
material poverty. Not to challenge conventional accounting in this context renders
social accounting more susceptible to its influence and thus enhances the grip of
problematic hegemonic forces upon it.
Overviewing the academic discourse of social accounting more generally, there are
a whole range of rhetorical emphases that arguably weaken social accounting in the
sense of constraining its emancipatory potential.32 We merely give a flavour of some
emphases of concern in what follows. Amongst these rhetorical emphases is the artic-
ulation of social accounting’s role as the reporting of consequences or effects of the
business organisation upon society (for instance Mobley 1970: 762, Epstein et al.
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 149
1976: 24, Gray et al. 1987: ix). In this context, if seeing business organisations as
socially significant in this way is not without merit, it may displace some potential
visibilities that could be pursued and thus restrict emancipatory possibilities. If, for
example, the business organisation and its characteristics are themselves viewed as
a consequence or effect of government policy, social pressures or the general function-
ings of the social context, business social accounting can assume a broader scope. For
instance, one can disclose the educational background of company directors,
a disclosure that goes beyond the scope of many mainstream delineations of social
accounting.33 More generally, there are dangers that a promotion of business social
accounting as idea and practice can displace other possible social accountings in respect
of individuals, groups intersecting across several organisations and the macro-social (see
Gallhofer and Haslam 1993). A related rhetorical emphasis that is problematic is the
emphasis upon the responsibilities of organisations, corporate bodies, entities or
enterprises (see for instance ASSC: 15, 25, Gray et al. 1987: ix). The entity’s person-
ification threatens to displace attention from the people involved. People can some-
how become uncoupled from key social actions as responsibilities come to be invested
in fictional entities. People can hide behind a corporate veil constituted by capitalis-
tic law. It is important that people are seen in terms of the roles they play as well as
in terms of their well-being if social accounting is to have a broad and positive eman-
cipatory consequence. The rhetoric of the academic discourse of social accounting has
also reinforced the public–private dichotomy that we ought to be questioning and
going beyond (cf. Arrington and Watkins 2002). Mobilising this dichotomy can help
delimit the social accounting we might properly apply to ‘private’ as distinct from
‘public’ sector operations. This threatens to counter a dimension of the rationale for
business social accounting, which is meant to reflect the public or social character of
business from a more holistic perspective. The potential applicability in the ‘private’
sector of control and accounting standards from the ‘public’ sector can be displaced.
Where social accounting is dominated by business social accounting, as it has been
over recent decades, mobilising or taking for granted a public–private dichotomy can
also displace the ‘public’ sector from attention, although there is some academic
work that constitutes a significant negation of this possibility (Broadbent et al. 1991,
Broadbent 1995). Whereas Mobley’s (1970: 762, supra) delineation of social account-
ing extended to ‘public’ and ‘private’ organisations that are categorised but ostensi-
bly given equal attention, such an orientation is now rare, with the mainstream focus
being business. Gray et al.’s (1987: ix) delineation of corporate social reporting (CSR),
which refers to an accounting for corporate entities and ‘particularly companies’, if
located in a text quite explicitly demarcating CSR from social accounting in general,
in effect has come to be the mainstream delineation of social accounting. Yet it makes
good sense to conceive, for instance, of a social accounting for schools, hospitals,
the police and local councils. It would be appropriate to challenge the dichotomy
public–private so as to open up further the possibility of comparing and contrasting
the accountings including social accountings of a variety of organisations, whatever
be their legal structure of ownership. Writing in the 1970s, Robertson (1976: 98)
observed a breaking down of the dichotomy between private and public sector in part
through social accounting: ‘The erosion of profitability as the single, dominant
150 Is social accounting the soul of justice?
indicator of company performance and the accelerating trend towards social account-
ing in the private sector, has narrowed the conceptual gap between it and the public
sector’ (Robertson 1976). This trajectory, which would see all organisations as being
partly public and private in character, has not continued as one might have hoped.
Related to the public–private dichotomy is reference in discourse to externalities (see
Gambling 1974, Tinker 1985). Given the basic thrust of the capitalistic legal struc-
ture, with the particular weight it gives to the notion of a business making profits
for private owners, it is an advance to recognise externalities in respect of the busi-
ness organisation even if externalities are often labeled as such in general discourse so
that they can be ignored. Yet, externalities emerge out of a structure of a socio-eco-
nomic system already problematically structured by capitalistic politico-economic
forces (see Tinker 1985: 199–200). It is important that the problematics of this
socio-political system are not displaced into notions of externalities (see also Lehman
and Tinker 1997, Lehman 1999).
Social accounting has had a poor image relative to conventional accounting. Many
business managers and accountants have not seen it as accounting at all (Bebbington
et al. 1994). There are a number of ways in which the academic discourse of social
accounting has conceivably contributed to this poor image and thus weakened social
accounting’s possibilities. One illustration is the way social accounting is proclaimed
as ‘new’ in the discourse when it can be perceived as having centuries of history: Gray
et al. (1996: 124) suggest that it manifested in ancient civilisations. Hopwood and
Burchell (1980), in an overview article on social accounting, offer ‘an explanation of
the scope, intentions and practical applications of this new discipline’ and stress that
‘it has been argued that some form of wider accounting must emerge to complement
the narrowly focused financial accountings of the past’. They suggest that it was in
recent history that ‘early social accounting experiments originated in the United States’
(12). Conventional accounting meanwhile is generally understood as ‘traditional’, as
in Gray et al.’s (1987) influential definition of corporate social reporting. Yet, as indi-
cated, social accounting has a long history. In modern history, interventions in
Europe centuries ago that fused ‘statistics’ and ‘accounting’ (cf. Burchell et al. 1980),
and aimed at mobilising accountings in the name of social betterment, can be under-
stood as social accounting interventions. One can delineate this type of intervention
in the context of seventeenth century rationalism and its eighteenth century legacy
(see Gallhofer and Haslam 1995). We have elaborated how Bentham’s project is espe-
cially of note. Bentham envisaged that an accounting rationalised in its limits would
serve well the duty to humanity. This is recognisable as a mode of ‘social accounting’
in today’s terms. His linking of social accounting to democracy, control, enlighten-
ment and wisdom are also echoed in more recent interventions. Further, Bentham
advocated and encouraged ‘counter’ accounting. There are also numerous examples
from before the twentieth century of various social accounting type practices being
pursued, for instance by businesses and religious communities (see Davidoff and Hall
1987, Guthrie and Parker 1989a,b, Gallhofer and Haslam 1995). If placing stress on
newness can be positive – an envisaged break with repression may be emphasised and
some may be inspired by a sense of being involved in something new – it is also the
case that, the longevity of an institution and practice can add to its value in many
Is social accounting the soul of justice? 151
cultures, including in Britain. De-emphasising social accounting’s historical continuities
threatens to conceivably delay or render overly cautious its adoption or make it easier
to pull out of if adopted. One can more easily characterise social accounting as imma-
ture, marginal, amateur and/or eccentric. To displace attention from how old an idea
is can reduce its weight. Conveying the sense of there having been calls for a social
accounting for a long time and arguing that by now many might have benefited from
its adoption could bolster the case for it. To conceive of social accounting as new may
lead one to overlook the insights that one can gain from historical study. Best (1995)
in this regard suggests that radical dimensions of philosophers such as Bentham and
Kant are often overlooked in sweeping and dismissive treatments of their texts today
(including, ironically, in some postmodern interventions). Promoters of social
accounting can positively mobilise the insight that the struggles for a democracy to
inform and empower the people in respect of the functionings of social institutions,
and for a ‘social accounting’ that would be emancipatory, have a long history.34
Aside from mobilising academic discourse in various problematic ways, we should
also add here that various other aspects of the interventions of academics in general
can equally be problematised. For example, we have already indicated that in getting
involved with campaigns to promote social accounting, academics have often prob-
lematically given legitimacy to dubious practices. Further, a cursory review of aca-
demic interventions indicates their lack of co-ordination. And social accounting’s
presence on educational syllabi is still disappointing. Gray et al.’s (2001) survey,
focused upon environmental but also giving attention to social accounting education,
echoes earlier disappointing findings (Owen et al. 1994, Humphrey et al. 1996, Watt
1998). Gray et al. (2001: 87–8) report a move from focusing upon social towards
environmental accounting, albeit that they also find a move towards the coverage of
social audit and acknowledge that the term ‘environmental’ has sometimes incorpo-
rated the social (see Vidal 2002). For Gray et al. (2001: 101): ‘Students and teachers
would appear to be overly influenced by the professional syllabi and are exceptionally
reluctant to step outside the notion of “accounting” as represented by those syllabi’.
Recent concerns on the part of professional bodies to develop programmes to enhance
communicative and intellectual skills may be taken as encouraging focuses upon phe-
nomena such as social accounting. The general picture is disappointing, however,
in spite of some positive signs.
The analyses of this book point to relevant insights for the project to better align
accounting and emancipation today. Nevertheless, ending here would feel like leaving
the train too early. We hope we can advance a little further or make more emancipa-
tory progress. Maintaining engagement in the struggle, we seek here, informed by
the insights of the above theoretical and empirical discussions and analyses, to reflect
further upon the possibilities of an emancipatory praxis implicating accounting
today. Our elaboration upon accounting, emancipation and praxis here builds upon
our theoretical intervention in Chapter 1 where we were concerned to elaborate the
possibility of a positive alignment between accounting and emancipation. Indeed, it
helps us to see that theoretical intervention, the interventions in the form of histori-
cal analyses that followed it (Chapters 2–4) as well as the intervention of this
chapter itself, as all instances of praxis. Our commentary can only be partial and
unfinished, raising questions and encouraging further work rather than providing
final answers. What we offer is a kind of sketch (Bronner 1994) of a notion of eman-
cipatory praxis implicating accounting rather than a blueprint. As a sketch, it can,
we suggest, encourage others to engage in a ‘differentiated universalist’ and emanci-
patory struggle and can restrain tendencies towards an approach that is at once
problematically universal, dogmatic and over burdened by the even detailed pres-
criptions of a ‘privileged knower’. It is a sketch that speaks to our concern, in summary
terms, to advance accounting and its context along the continuum towards a more
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Index